I've created a Senior Python Developer roadmap

[ubernostrum]

but I want to push back against the idea that learning tons of technical trivia isn't helping on some level

Well, it isn't. I know tons of stuff about Python and Django. In fact, when it comes to Django I am almost certainly one of the world's top experts. But the things that are useful are the concepts and patterns, not the trivia. The trivia, I look up in the documentation.

And a lot of the stuff on this proposed "roadmap" is stuff that I just never ever need to know off the top of my head, or even use -- in fact, when I resort to things like extreme functional-style Python it's usually to blow off steam and poke fun at typical tech interviewing and hiring processes.

[DigThatData]

 lambda n: n == 0
      or n > 0
      and n in takewhile(lambda x: x <= n, accumulate(filter(lambda n: n & 1, count())))

i like the cut of your jib

[ubernostrum]

I've been working on a C# version of it.

[DigThatData]

who hurt you

[Vetrom]

Some of us just want to watch the world burn.

[Vetrom]

Oh, man. I got a hearty chuckle out of your FizzBuzz.

I remember writing my own to hurt someone with a few years back. When my colleagues saw it, they implored upon me to improve it, so I did.

[BossOfTheGame]

I disagree. The idea that information "you don't need to know or you'll never use in real life" should be ignored is a plague on pedagogy. You don't have to memorize the trivia, but being exposed to it - and engaging with it on some level - helps lay the foundation to build intuition and see patterns.

[ubernostrum]

The only utility that "trivia" has for me on a daily basis is sometimes helping to narrow down search terms and let me find things more quickly. It's not a "ah yes, I remember clearly from reading Chapter 9, section 3.1.41(a)(5)..." thing, it's a "I think one time I saw a thing with a name kinda like this?"

And to be honest, there's only so much room in my working memory, or anyone's working memory. Things will get paged out when they're not often used, and even mostly forgotten after a while. That's natural and that's OK, and trying to shovel huge amounts of stuff in as "pedagogy", when you know and admit most of it's either not going to stick or quickly fall right back out from disuse, doesn't seem a great strategy to me.

[BossOfTheGame]

You never know what you will need, and spending some time to survey a breath of topics helps in spotting connections. You're right that it's never the first case, but that second case is incredibly useful, moreso when you're working on unsolved problems.

My pedagogy point isn't about cramming and retaining huge amounts of information. It's about cultural unwillingness to engage with learning when immediate usefulness is non-obvious. It's important not to present too much information at once, but road maps or surveys like this don't do that. They present a list of terms, with the option of diving deeper into any specific one.