On the Laravel News site there's a new post that tries to answer the question "can you be a an expert developer in 10,000 hours?" This is based on some prior research (not specific to programming) that anyone can be an expert on anything in about 10 thousand hours worth of work and study on the subject. This post takes the ideas presented there and applies them to the world of development, trying to see if there's a good match.

Back in 1993, psychologists K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer said that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice of a specific skill will make one an expert. Fast forward 15 years, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers made the 10,000 hours rule famous. And in 2012, Macklemore solidified it’s fact status: it officially takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at anything.

How does this rule correlate to coding? If you’ve been working full time as a dev for five years, you’d be considered an expert by the parameters of the rule. [...] The problem with the 10,000 hours rule to excellence is that most domains aren’t static.

The article goes on to talk about the ever-changing world of technology (as compared to static activities where the rules aren't going to change). They talk about the Laravel framework and how it has evolved since beta/version 1 and how, if the 10k rule is applied, no one is an "expert" as it changes so fast. There's also a link to a study that debunked the 10k rule and so they shift to trying to answer another question: how much does it take to be just considered "good"? This is related back to software engineering and where in the process could it be that you move from "good" to "great".

Maybe the real question here is instead of trying to be an expert software developer, what aspects of your job can you improve in 20 hours of practice? Maybe the focus shouldn’t just be on the code; after all, your job is more than just staring at glowing screens all day. Identifying specific areas of weakness that you can devote time to strengthening every week may be the key to becoming that expert that you desire to be.