Comments on: The Technology Cliff: How Time Off From Programming Affects Your Chops

By: fred

fred — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:10:33 +0000

I took 6 years off. Some things it was hard to get back, others were no problem. Since I’ve been back, I’ve picked up one new language – PHP. The ability to Google any problem you encounter definitely makes it easier. There were still a lot of little problems in the environment that interfered with my productivity for awhile. I think that the “cliff” is also a sign that there is something wrong your programming environment. Things are more complicated than they need to be.
Certainly, coming back has made me question the need to write in a lower-level language like java. There are just way more ‘gotchas’ in a language like that and just to get started requires a huge amount of knowledge. OTOH, databases haven’t really changed much, Javascript is pretty much the same, and PHP is pretty easy to be productive in.

By: Devjargon

Devjargon — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:53:18 +0000

After an extended hiatus, the best way for me to get back into the programming mindset is just to code. Hard to believe isn’t it. It isn’t exactly like getting back on a bike though, things don’t just come rushing back to you.

After a long break from programming it generally takes me between 1 week and 3 weeks to get fully immersed in programming practices and back to my usual coding ways.

By: Response to ‘Two Flaws With “Time Off From Programming”‘ | Software by Rob

Sat, 24 May 2008 19:53:30 +0000

[...] Giles Bowkett published a post titled Two Flaws With “Time Off From Programming” that disputes some of the thoughts in my recent article The Technology Cliff: How Time Off From Programming Affects Your Chops. [...]

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:48:44 +0000

@O.F. – I definitely don’t want to get into a discussion about what constitutes a “real language.” But realize just because something doesn’t change doesn’t mean it’s reached perfection. It may just mean that people have lost interest.

By: old fart

old fart — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:30:52 +0000

Ha! That’s you you get for subscribing to flavor of the week programming. Go work with some real languages that have actually stood the test of time and don’t need a market-based forced obsolencene every 4 years.

By: JeanHuguesRobert

JeanHuguesRobert — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:31:29 +0000

Programming is about knowledge, modelization and coding.

I believe that the lack of practice affects coding mostly.

Because experience tells you that you need to put more energy in modelization, and that is a lesson that you do not forget, whereas lack of practice of programming will always reduce your coding agility.

To a large extend the increased experience about modelization compensate the lack of coding agility, but a little practice is a must.

To put it differently: Experience is about your potential, whereas Practice is about your current ability.

The Knowledge aspect, about new fashionable technology, is the one that suffer most when you don’t practice at all, but with a lot of Experience you discover that the same concepts reappears with different names.

I believe that over the last 20 years the two significant programming “news” were 1/ Object Oriented Programming and 2/ Cloud computing.

Not so much to master, isn’t it?

By: Jon Limjap

Jon Limjap — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:01:33 +0000

I guess this is a reminder for devs to, for when they move to management roles, they remain updated in new technology, even just toy-coding with new stuff at least a few hours a week. Otherwise the rust just builds.

By: Raju

Raju — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:31:23 +0000

Good article, and I wholeheartedly agree. I find myself struggling even after 2-3 weeks of gaps, let alone 2 years. Though I think you can take this a bit further, and apply this to a technology as well. For ex. if you were doing .Net (C#) development, and stepped away to pursue Ruby for a while, getting your feet wet with C# would take some time.

By: neil

neil — Fri, 16 May 2008 03:17:47 +0000

Wow, that’s great news! – thanks. I was expecting 60 to 80 hr weeks there, with no other life left. I like the part of 2 days research and then hit the code hard for 3 x 8.

It’d be hard to do that in an office environment with a team I’d think though. But it does show how if you get your head down to a task and focus what you can acheive in a normal working week.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:35:34 +0000

I’ve noticed this even when I’m still actively coding if I switch platforms or stacks and then try to switch back after a while. I did server software for 2 years and then came back to web apps and *so effing much* had happened in that two years that I had tech whiplash.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:25:24 +0000

@Neil – When I returned to coding I hit it with a vengeance. I was in research and prototype mode 2 days a week so that allowed me to explore the new technologies in-depth, and then I was coding hard on a real project a solid 8 per day for the other 3 days.

It amounted to about 35 hours per week of solid coding – very few meetings or distractions. The fact that I had those research days in addition to building the project really helped out.

By: neil

neil — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:20:31 +0000

Interesting that after 2yrs off you “only” took 6mths to get back up to speed. I’d like to know how many hours you were putting in though to get there? Were you coding .Net all day? So say 8hrs a day 5 days a week, or were there more hours in the evening and weekend?

For myself I find that I’m working on lots of small tasks/projects that can be across versions, plus having to do analysis / managment / client talking. So this slows me down (considerably) as my day (life!) is very disjointed.

Be interesting to hear your ‘routine’ and the hours involved.

By: MattyJ

MattyJ — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:30:20 +0000

“Think of a VB6 developer who took 4 years off between 2001 and 2005 and tried to pick up .NET 2.0 based on his existing VB6 knowledge.”

I know VB6 programmers who did *not* take 4 years off and still can’t [redacted. People know where I live.] Ha ha.

I’m a technical, non-programmer guy that lives and dies by my knowledge of tools and just taking a year off from administering, say, a source control tool can kill someone in this line of work.

I find that you retain all the crazy workarounds to bugs and mis-placed menu items and it takes a while to work those out of your system when such things have been changed or fixed.

Either because I’m awesome or because I’m an idiot, I routinely download demo versions of tools I have no intention of ever using or supporting, because you just never know when you’ll be called upon to have some ‘expert’ knowledge on something.