Honestly all of that sounds like it maps pretty well to programming.
I sometimes run little 30 minute programming workshops where I teach people enough of the basics that they can walk away with something they’ve made. Give a novice 3 months to go through an bootcamp and they can become a half useful programmer.
But the “other half” of their knowledge will take a lifetime to learn. In just the last 2 weeks my job has involved: crypto algorithms, security threat modelling, distributed systems design, network protocols, binary serialisation, Async vs sync design choices, algorithmic optimization and CRDTs.
It’s easy enough to be a “good enough” programmer with a few months of study. But it takes a lifetime of work if you want to be an all terrain developer.
> Honestly all of that sounds like it maps pretty well to programming.
Yes, definitely. And, BTW, this also means that lots of useful work can be done without necessarily having golden credentials.
Here's where I see a huge difference between hardware and software at scale (I have been doing so for 40 years): Hardware, again, at scale, represents a serious financial and technical commitment at the point of release. Software gives you the ability to release a minimum-viable-product that mostly works and issues fixes or updates as often as needed.
If we imagine a world where v1.0 of a piece of software must work 100% correct and have a useful service life of, say, ten or twenty years, we come close to the kind of commitment real electronics design requires. You have to get it right or the company is out of business. Not so with most software products, be it embedded, desktop, industrial or web.
If I go back to the late 80's, I remember releasing a small electronic product that gave us tons of problems. The design went through extensive testing --or so I thought-- and yet, contact with actual users managed to reveal problems. I had to accelerate the next-generation design, put it through more extensive testing and release it. We had to replace hundreds of the first generation units for free because we felt it did not represent what we wanted to deliver. This is where knowledge and experience can be invaluable.
I sometimes run little 30 minute programming workshops where I teach people enough of the basics that they can walk away with something they’ve made. Give a novice 3 months to go through an bootcamp and they can become a half useful programmer.
But the “other half” of their knowledge will take a lifetime to learn. In just the last 2 weeks my job has involved: crypto algorithms, security threat modelling, distributed systems design, network protocols, binary serialisation, Async vs sync design choices, algorithmic optimization and CRDTs.
It’s easy enough to be a “good enough” programmer with a few months of study. But it takes a lifetime of work if you want to be an all terrain developer.