> It's really just a matter of breaking down your problem into bite size pieces and confronting them one at a time.
my gut tells me I disagree. I think that differentiates junior from senior programmer. Junior will take a big problem, chop into small chunks, make them work properly and kill project while trying to get all those small pieces to work together. Senior will look long enough on a big picture and of course will start from small but will always be aware how all pieces need to fit together. While my statement may sound obvious to everyone and you may say "junior should do the same", in reality your "confronting one piece at the time" is what made me disagree.
I do, however, believe you can tap into a middle-size problem without knowing how to code complex algorithms, especially in a startup world. Look at Facebook. Zuck never been the smartest programmer, but I dont think he took upon huge complex algorithms to get into the MVP stage just to prove user's numbers to investors and get money to hire programmers that could rewrite it from scratch to serve it to tens of millions of users flexibly.
my gut tells me I disagree. I think that differentiates junior from senior programmer. Junior will take a big problem, chop into small chunks, make them work properly and kill project while trying to get all those small pieces to work together. Senior will look long enough on a big picture and of course will start from small but will always be aware how all pieces need to fit together. While my statement may sound obvious to everyone and you may say "junior should do the same", in reality your "confronting one piece at the time" is what made me disagree.
I do, however, believe you can tap into a middle-size problem without knowing how to code complex algorithms, especially in a startup world. Look at Facebook. Zuck never been the smartest programmer, but I dont think he took upon huge complex algorithms to get into the MVP stage just to prove user's numbers to investors and get money to hire programmers that could rewrite it from scratch to serve it to tens of millions of users flexibly.