I’m going to go against the flow and say nothing. I think the primary reason you see seniors looking for senior focused platforms is because almost all the learning content is terrible. Seniors will spot this sooner than juniors. I’ve worked as an external examiner for CS students for a decade and the stuff they put themselves through to avoid reading official docs is amazing. They’ll literally sit through 50 hours of video of what is essentially two a4 pages of “example how-to”.
Why a senior wouldn’t just head directly to the documentation for a programming language or the equivalent to “The C++ Programming Language” is a different question though. Learning a new language is extremely easy, it’s learning how the compiler, runtime and so on which is hard. You’ll very rarely find that outside of official docs or books written by extremely knowledgeable people.
I 100% agree with your take and suspect most actual "seniors" do as well.
Eventually most seniors should come to the realization that expecting there to be a "senior" oriented platform is unrealistic for a variety of reasons (mostly, because the exercise based nature of platform learning in the beginner sense just isn't the sort of thing you need to learn to become senior level in a language and isn't super useful to seniors coming from other languages...).
A real senior that is really trying to learn a new language or ecosystem to a reasonable amount of competence should start with the docs and with a small (but sizeable, enough to have to learn the languages tooling and whatnot) project.
I shouldn't even comment on this, but if you expect there to be video tutorials for the kind of thing you are trying to learn, then maybe you have experienced some form of title inflation. Eventually, people need to learn to read the (f'ing) manual, and I hate to say it like that because it's infamously toxic when inappropriately told to beginners as advice, but it's the truth for somebody that calls themselves a senior.
That's how I've learned Python, so far. Between that and, writing my own code, and looking at other's code, Ive picked up quite a bit (not an expert but I think I'm doing OK).
The easy part is the language, the difficult part is learning to do things the Pythonic way.
Of course, I have to allow for the Dunning-Kreuger effect.
You sound well aware of the fact that being able to put out working python code doesn't necessarily mean you fully understand all of the best practices and idioms that the particular community uses, and that's okay. You are aware of your weakness.
If you were stuck in "tutorial hell" but thought you knew the language, then maybe that would be Dunning-Kreuger. Or if you were unaware of your not writing idiomatic code due to coming from a different language and being new.
I think the main issue with most documentation is that everything is treated equally, and often critical details get a passing mention, so it's helpful to have focused course material that can give some indication of priority and a heads up for the tricky parts.
The challenge with this, and I agree with you, is that I don’t think you’ll find many people capable of creating such a course being in the course creation business. I suspect almost no one would be interested in doing it. The only financial motivation would be to go the consultancy route like Uncle Bob, and I’m not sure who would have any sort of motivation to do it as a hobby project. You’d be more likely to find those people contributing to the actual programming language in some way.
As I see it the programming teaching industry, or whatever you might call it, is similar to other self-help industries where people who are good at marketing sell you empty calories. Even if you created an in dept course on something, you would probably have an issue distributing it in the vast ocean of courses.
“50 hours of video” seems especially true for cloud certificates. Figured maybe I should finally pick up an AWS cloud cert or two and realised that video courses tend to be 40-50 hours per certificate. If you’ve already worked with AWS, or any cloud provider really, a lot of that content looks tedious.
In the end I bought a “course” that’s 6 practice exams with high quality questions and explanations of each answer. For AWS it’s been a nice approach, so far anyway, because the docs are truly vast and I probably wouldn’t have thought to read the docs for Snowmobile, which I don’t use day to day.
All your reasoning is agreeable but I disagree with the foremost conclusion
> I’m going to go against the flow and say nothing.
Whether we're talking about the actual language or the surrounding tooling and ecosystem, very few language and ecosystem experiences are actually different. As a result you're often mapping needs that you already satisfied and can explicitly state to another language. Someone who has already learned their n-th language looks at learning very differently.
This also makes a seasoned learner vastly more capable of extracting value from a friend or colleague who is willing to steer the learning experience.
Why a senior wouldn’t just head directly to the documentation for a programming language or the equivalent to “The C++ Programming Language” is a different question though. Learning a new language is extremely easy, it’s learning how the compiler, runtime and so on which is hard. You’ll very rarely find that outside of official docs or books written by extremely knowledgeable people.