alt Hacker News> Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.
At least in my experience, the best engineers have a vast catalog of problems and solutions, algorithms, architecture patters, data structures etc and almost nothing comes from scratch. The worst engineers do everything from scratch without much/any understanding that the problem they are facing (or a variation of it) has been solved before in 6 different ways with varying tradeoffs.
“Master all prior art before naively trying to do anything on your own” - also, very much does way more harm than good in a learning context. (it narrows the top of the funnel for no good reason)
The gripe seems to be the negative effect on the team, business/project outcome etc, sure work doesn’t pay you to write your own compiler.
But again, its such a disservice to learning to dictate a shape, largely academic, largely top down (vs bottoms up failing & flailing).