Uhh so if you can't learn by "sitting at the feet of" a "master", you learn what you can by yourself and touch base occasionally with the good people you do know and soak up what you can. Hardly insightful.<p>You can just say "try to work with programmers better than you" without all this medieval framing.<p>I personally think all this talk of the "Way" and guild inspired talk of "masters" and "journeymen" and so on is pretentious and inappropriate for programming in the 21st century but that's just me. In the olden days you <i>had</i> to join a guild and apprentice yourself to a "master" to learn a craft.<p>In programming, while it would be great to work with really good people(say, the kind of people interviewed in Coders at Work), the default for almost everyone is to learn without the benefit of a "master programmer". Pete McBreen wrote this really terrible book and from then we have all these pious mumblings about "apprentices" and "journeymen".
Where did the things I need to know to do my job come from?<p><pre><code> Mom, Dad, & family 10%
kindergarden 5%
elementary school 1%
middle school 1%
high school 1%
college (B.S. math) 1%
college fraternity 5%
business school (MBA) 1%
my first mentor 5%
my second mentor 10%
my users over the years 10%
my employers & customers 10%
reading 5%
other programmers 5%
doing on my own 30%
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100%</code></pre>