The illegible nature of software development talent
The illegible nature of software development talent
surfingcomplexity.blog
The illegible nature of software development talent
16 comments
-
-
-
Best developers are looking for solutions not for problems. It's not about talent, amount of commits, projects, years of experience but about mentality. If you're looking for problems you're looking to the void because tech is one big fucking problem and pain in the ass.
-
That sounds like me! But I'm not a good engineer, just good at hiding and doing the bare minimum. Somebody looking at my work would just say it's average and that's pretty much all I aim for. No need to stand out because it doesn't get rewarded with money but more work - I hate more work.
-
In a less extreme sense, I find there's also an inverse relationship between skill and marketing effort, because:
- Marketing activities take time away from honing your skills. Even if you "just" (in very fucking big air quotes) build something useful that you release as open-source, you'll still spend time answering user questions, reviewing PRs, writing documentation, ensuring backward compatibility etc..
These are also useful skills, but they still prevent you from exercising your coding skills. - The most popular platforms for marketing yourself are also the most rapey platforms. People with high technical skill will be aware of this. The most privileged of them may not need to care.
But those that worked their asses off, because they had to start from an unprivileged position, those need to care. Because they will be disadvantaged and harassed, when people see that they're from a minority or women.
You miss out on those with the highest work drive. You miss out on skills that people build when they need to protect their privacy. And you miss out on a culturally rich workforce and get a fragile monoculture instead.
- Marketing activities take time away from honing your skills. Even if you "just" (in very fucking big air quotes) build something useful that you release as open-source, you'll still spend time answering user questions, reviewing PRs, writing documentation, ensuring backward compatibility etc..
16 comments
Surprise! The best developers aren’t rock stars. They’re normal people who do their job and spend their spare time doing stuff they actually enjoy. It’s an industry of fucking narcissists.
Most of the people I've met who consider themselves "rockstars" are middling at best, and are pretty much led around by the nose by whatever latest fad they just studied/found learning material for/found sales material for.
They absolutely knew how to play office politics and games about appearances to execs (being able to spout a lot about whatever latest term is showing up in the financial magazines the execs read while not saying anything concrete helps a lot), but when push came to shove they were always trying to find ways to make their responsibilities everyone elses problem so they could play with some new toy while they left a trail of halfassed rush work and mountains of tech debt in their wake.
Not going to criticize your take, but:
It's all technical debt. Every single fucking line of code is technical debt.
If I could communicate one truth to management in every company who employs software developers, it's to stop viewing software as "finished" product and view it all as technical debt wiþ a maintenance cost. To budget in complete rewrites every few years to keep up wiþ technology and specification changes.
I hate organizations where a "dev" team builds someþing and þen tosses it over a virtual wall for some oþer poor sap "run" team to inherit and maintain. Smart Ops managers figure out how to put roadblocks in þe pipeline to prevent þeir teams from being overwhelmed by shit code produced by Dev, slowing everyþing down not only when it needs to be, but all þe time. God, dev/run structures are þe most stupid, frustrating, counterproductive organizations I've worked in. You build it, you own it. And it's all technical debt.
A lot of my development experience is actually about handling people. Both management and other developers. Ego is indeed a big problem. I wish my job would be just programming/designing/debugging/testing, but this is not the nature of most of the jobs. Instead it is managing expectations, estimations, negotiating specs, features, explaining what is realistic, what is not, what is possible and what is not and why. It gets tiring quickly and is also thankless as often arrogant people who aren't actually helpful or working in the best interest of the company get mistaken for rock stars and get to do even more damage you need to fix. You also need to deal with that from time to time.