Ask HN: What topics/subjects are worth learning for a new software engineer?
Too many software engineers get into a mindset of “just make it work.” For me, making it work is only half the battle. You need to build something that will make it possible for you or someone else to come back to later and be able to reason about and modify or extend.<p>I interview a lot of job candidates and I give them a very simple problem. Pretty much everyone can solve it, but I’m not just looking for them to solve it. I’m looking for them to find the right abstraction—one that will make it easy to extend the problem and for junior devs to look at the solution function and understand exactly what it’s doing. Almost no one passes.<p>My coworkers ask “just make it work” problems in interviews, and I believe that has contributed to our codebase being a nightmare to work with.<p>I think most software engineering is an organization problem, rather than a optimization problem. My advice: learn functional programming and object oriented design. You will learn how to write declarative code that is loosely coupled and not dependent on its context.