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Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

>but when you have somebody that supposedly has a few years experience this is just infuriating.

You know how sometimes programmers on Hacker news talk about toxic team mates who are hard to work with and bog the whole team down through arrogance?

Becoming furious when someone asks you a question and truly wishing they'd waste half a day deriving it from first principals themselves rather than just asking you and having an answer in 30 seconds makes you one of those toxic team mates.

Modern software development is a team game. The average speed of the team is what matters, not your personal speed.

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And it's great to have a management chain that recognizes this: it's hard to find people who specifically go out of their way to build up a team around them, so recognize and reward those people highly.

Given the choice, I don't want a "10x" programmer who works alone or only wants to work with other "10x" programmers. I want a 2x programmer who turns everyone around them into a 2x programmer while becoming a 4x programmer, and who then turns all those 2x programmers into 4x programmers while becoming an 8x programmer, and whose newly minted 2x programmers turn everyone around them into 2x programmers while becoming 4x programmers.

Sir, I have worked with many a toxic team-mate who did nothing but wander around the office, making noise, and getting other people to do their work. Because they didn't do their work themselves they didn't have ownership of it, and it simply "didn't work" and when something inevitably went wrong with it others had to sort it out because it's the team that matters, not blaming an individual. This slowed the overall velocity of the team, despite our best intentions in giving these guys a dig out. I really see no need to smear me for having a countering opinion.

I have had co-workers claim that they think someone has gone in and altered their code overnight, as it was working yesterday (I ended up debugging the problem for her and fixing it in the end).

That sort of attitude gets seriously wearing.

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