The ability to focus on one concern at a time is the mark of a senior developer. It takes experience to ignore other factors as noise. It takes time to learn how to avoid tripping on distractions and side-quests.
Ben Nadel, Only Solve One Problem at a Time:
This lesson hits me hard in the feels because when I reflect on my own work history, some of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in my career revolve around trying to solve multiple problems at the same time. Perhaps one of the most embarrassing examples of this is when I was attempting to learn OOP (Object Oriented Programming) on a new project. This was two problems: I had to build a new application; and, I tried to do it in a new programming paradigm.
Needless to say, the project ended up coming in months late and was a horrible mess of hard-to-maintain code. Trying to solve two problems at the same time ended in disaster.
Nearly universal advice for developers of all experience levels!
The trick for juniors is, they’re always learning more than one thing at a time, often on accident. They want to build a feature, but it requires a new library, and it requires learning the library. They went to start up a development server, but then something weird happens with Unix. It’s the essential challenge of being a junior – they’re just getting started, so they’re always learning a couple of things at a time.
Perversely, a senior who can see the whole feature/change in their head is sometimes tempted to push the whole thing through in one (large) change. They’re tempted to make the entire thing happen in one outburst of crisp thinking.
Developers who have learned to avoid pitfalls and gotchas sometimes have to relearn how to work incrementally. Juniors (frequently) don’t have this problem. If they don’t work incrementally, they won’t make progress at all! (Caution: juniors that try to work like the seniors they see around them will fall into this trap.)
That said, juniors and seniors both tend to struggle with:
- deciding when to focus vs. when to jump out of a rabbit hole
- building their own feedback loops with tests/compilers, jigs/scaffolding
- imagining and applying constraints
- using first-principle thinking to reduce the overwhelming possibility space of programming
These skills don’t come with simple experience. One has to decide to apply them and then build up experience using them to keep development on-track, focused, and effective.
