I came in as a hobbyist and had no mentors because as I slowly adapted to doing coding at work I was not in coding jobs so had no immediate access to role models. It took me really painful stretches of time to learn really simple things. I think I was unaware of perldoc for nearly the first two years I was (partially) paid to write Perl. On that point: Re: Perl Certified!, many Perl basics eluded me but I had no problem with references and other quote-expert–unquote Perlisms because they were necessary to solving problems.
It’s the person, not the time. Plenty of professional programmers are awful because they don’t care. They clock in and out and finish their projects. Some professionals love it so they go home and read, tinker, try new languages, participate in forums, publish open source code, submit patches to others. One of these hackers is worth, quite literally, 20 or more of the other in terms of productivity.
You can become quite good at anything with 2 years of dedication. A real expert in 5. There is more to it than that, though, as alluded above. Give this a spin: Great Hackers.
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