Probably exponential. The programmer with 10 years of experience doesn't see twice as far into a problem as someone with 5 years, but more like 4 or 10 or 100 times as far.
The reason why is pretty straightforward but I don't hear it talked about much. Any human mind is pretty good at solving a problem, and two heads are better than one. But the bottleneck is the basic communication between people.
So the more contextual background (experience) one has in a problem, the faster one is able to explore the problem space and iterate before he or she begins writing the solution in the real world. That's not going to be replaced by Agile or any other workflow in the foreseeable future.
I saw this firsthand from my supervisor when I had a 1 year contract at hp in my mid 20s (he was in his 40s). I was used to dealing with C++, compilers, some scripting with PHP and Python, that sort of thing.
It took me about a day to complete a ticket like writing a method to, say, load some data and show it on the screen in C++ or HTML. Meanwhile he was swizzling data in spreadsheets, piping it around the shell and doing deep analysis on it in large single passes in a functional manner with the vector and matrix processing techniques of MATLAB. He'd go from unstructured data to a report in an hour or two. Stuff that would take me days, weeks, or not even be feasible with the techniques that I was used to.
I look back on that year as being as important to my education as all the years before that and college combined. My only regret is that I see so far now that it almost hurts to write the code where the money is. A deep reservoir of discipline and frankly stamina are needed to protect the mind from being drug down by the antipatterns surrounding us.
Probably exponential. The programmer with 10 years of experience doesn't see twice as far into a problem as someone with 5 years, but more like 4 or 10 or 100 times as far.
Even if that’s true, most companies are at most looking at the next fiscal year and VC backed funds are just looking to survive until their next funding round or to their exit.
The reason why is pretty straightforward but I don't hear it talked about much. Any human mind is pretty good at solving a problem, and two heads are better than one. But the bottleneck is the basic communication between people.
So the more contextual background (experience) one has in a problem, the faster one is able to explore the problem space and iterate before he or she begins writing the solution in the real world. That's not going to be replaced by Agile or any other workflow in the foreseeable future.
I saw this firsthand from my supervisor when I had a 1 year contract at hp in my mid 20s (he was in his 40s). I was used to dealing with C++, compilers, some scripting with PHP and Python, that sort of thing.
It took me about a day to complete a ticket like writing a method to, say, load some data and show it on the screen in C++ or HTML. Meanwhile he was swizzling data in spreadsheets, piping it around the shell and doing deep analysis on it in large single passes in a functional manner with the vector and matrix processing techniques of MATLAB. He'd go from unstructured data to a report in an hour or two. Stuff that would take me days, weeks, or not even be feasible with the techniques that I was used to.
I look back on that year as being as important to my education as all the years before that and college combined. My only regret is that I see so far now that it almost hurts to write the code where the money is. A deep reservoir of discipline and frankly stamina are needed to protect the mind from being drug down by the antipatterns surrounding us.