alt Hacker News> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer.
That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon??
I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. Didactic books always have exercises for this reason.
You can learn facts and techniques from books, obviously. But just because you've read a book about Michelin restaurants that you can now be a Michelin Chef.
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> That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn.
That is, and has always been, true. Currently, however, the narrative that is sold (and unfortunately accepted by so many of the senior developers who post here) is that the experience of telling someone else to do something is just as valuable.
Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.
Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none.
There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path.
“Oh yeah, like who”, you say.
Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.
I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects.
Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot.
Not one drop of this would have been possible had I taken the traditional corporate track.