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I had an informal expertise extraction conversation yesterday, with a senior software engineer I respect. The preliminary takeaway for software design expertise is that experts *attempt to predict the direction of change* for their software requirements, and design accordingly.

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The YAGNI paradox…

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wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonna

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IMHO this fits into a larger dichotomy of school vs work: in school we learn to solve problems that millions of other students have solved before us; a right answer is out there – you just have to figure it out, by yourself, without help. After undergrad, it's the opposite!

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School: solve this problem set, once you get the right answer, you can forget about it and move on Work: everything's a moving target, nobody has any idea what the right answer is, and if you actually succeed in buildilng something useful, you'll be maintaining this forever

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You know, now that I have this piece of information, that one higher level skill in programming is predicting and managing change, why *can’t* we teach this in schools?

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It seems totally possible. Say, have a whole bunch of simulations, where students come up with a solution for some problem, and then after each submission, they uncover new information — the client changes their mind, the API they used turns out to be flakey, etc.

2:04 PM · Jun 23, 2022Twitter Web App

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That sounds like CS3217. It was really intense and I still make use of skills from that course.