alt Hacker NewsThis is something I've seen repeated time and time again as a criticism of (misused) abstraction and DRY, yet I've never seen ONCE -- and this is not hyperbole, I mean it literally -- a junior making an abstraction with any thought to reuse, generalizing anything, or caring about not repeating code. Most juniors I've worked with are content to just churn new code without paying attention to the codebase at all. This all before the AI deluge, mind you.
Very similar with patterns. I've often read people protesting that juniors overuse design patterns, yet I've seldom seen a junior (mis)use anything more complex than a singleton, and when they use any pattern, it's usually forced upon them by an opinionated Java framework.
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In the early 2000s I often saw juniors and students make staggeringly deep class hierarchies. The equivalent of:
Shape::Polygon::ConvexPolygon::FourSidedConvexPolygon::Square::BlueSquare...
"Intro to OOP" lectures/articles made a deep impression on some people in not quite the right way :)
This smells more like the fluidity of what people mean by “junior” more than anything else. Journeymen engineers in their over-engineering phase, or even very “senior” expert programmers can suffer over fitting the product to their own mental model. The most senior judgment is to understand when an abstraction makes sense at a customer level, because that defines the durability of a business-logic abstraction.