Continue the Peter Norvig series. The first post was about: What Peter Norvig Learn about ‘Industrial Programming’? now it’s time to talk about the way of learning to work on a team during the time.

Seibel: Do you think that learning to work on teams that way also enables you to actually work on bigger things even by yourself when you’re sort of a team spread across time?

Norvig: I think that’s true and that’s certainly something I see in the younger programmers that are coming out now. Another difference between now and then is it seems like it’s much more assembling pieces now rather than writing everything from scratch. Now, for a school assignment, someone says, “OK, I needed a website, so I used Ruby on Rails for this, and I used Drupal for that part, and then I had this Python script, and then I downloaded this statistical routine,” and it’s all scripting to put together these pieces rather than writing everything from scratch. So I think understanding interfaces and how they go together is more important than all the details of the insides of these packages.

Seibel: And do you think that changes the kind of people who can be successful at programming now?

Norvig: I think the people that are really successful are the same—at least that’s what I see around here. But, yeah, it is a little bit more of, “Can I quickly get an understanding of what I need,” and less of, “I need complete understanding.” I think some of it is bravado, this willingness to say, “I’m just going to go ahead and do it,” the fearlessness of saying, “I don’t understand everything that’s going on, but I went into the documentation and I learned these three things. I tried it and it worked, so I’m just going to go ahead.”

That gets you to a certain point, but I think to really be a good programmer, you can’t just do that. You have to understand a little bit more, and say, “Is it safe, what I’m doing here? Or what are the failure cases? Sure, I tried it once and it worked, but is it always going to work? How do I write test cases to show that and to understand it a little better, and then once I’ve done that, can I extract what I’ve done and publish a new tool that other people can use because I’ve put these pieces together in a certain way.”

Coders at Work – Page 294 – Peter Norvig