I've Forgotten More Than You'll Ever Know
Senior developers often say they don't know much, then spend 15 minutes explaining the auth and caching behind their 'simple' API. Run it recursively: what do you do, and what do you need to know to do that? The lessons you've forgotten are gold to everyone behind you.
Ever heard someone say “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know”?
Welcome to being a senior developer.
There’s a conversation I’ve had more than a few times lately. A senior developer tells me they really don’t know that much. Not much to offer a new employer.
And it makes me smile.
Not because I enjoy hearing it. Because I know exactly how the rest of the conversation is going to go.
Dev: “I really don’t know all that much. I just do my job.”
Me: “Fair. So what do you do?”
Dev: “I build APIs for this project.”
Me: “Nice. Seems simple enough. Don’t need to worry about security or anything?”
Dev: “Oh no. We actually support 3 different authentication methods depending on the client, and for performance we have to cache tokens across…”
15 minutes later, I have my answer. And so do they.
When you’ve done something long enough, you stop noticing everything that goes into the “simple” things you do every day.
Don’t believe me? Try this. Better yet, run it on a fellow developer.
Answer the question: “What do you do?” Write it down.
Then ask: “What are 3 things I need to know to do that?” Write those down.
Then ask the same question about each of those.
Yes, it’s recursive. Just do me a favor and stop after 15-30 minutes, or you’ll go down a rabbit hole you never crawl out of.
The point is this. We forget the lessons that got us here, because we learned them so long ago they just feel like how things are done.
All of those lessons we’ve forgotten?
They’re gold to the developers behind us, and to the employers trying to solve those same problems.