Premium mediocrity is software engineering’s demographic | Hacker News Reader

Premium mediocrity is software engineering’s demographic

shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com

19 pointsdailymorn9 comments

I think that justifying personal ignorance as e.g. a "minimalist knowledge approach" is the root of mediocrity.

Excellent developers have no sense of learned helplessness. They will not settle for ignorance in either their tools or their business knowledge. They go beyond "trial and error". In the short run they might have to make compromises with current limited knowledge, but they won't stop learning.

Mediocre engineers use mediocre tools, foster mediocre cultures, and won't drive each other to excel. They will produce, at best, adequacy. Don't lionize that.

"Mediocre" is way too negative. The writer could also have used "pragmatic". I started working purely in C and there it was worth to deeply get into it. These days you have to know a much wider range of tools so it's hard to know them all in detail. Because of this I have learned to prefer simple code.

Personally I wouldn't mind having the times back when you had the time to become a complete C++ geek but these days are over for most of us.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

Anybody click through to read this? Awesome.

I really liked it. I may be borderline "cryptobourgeoisie," but this article really captures the life of the college grad millennial who hasn't been as lucky.

Remember that writing code is one of many tasks of a software engineer. You need to communicate with stakeholders, understand and help shape requirements, work on estimating (yes unfortunately), liaise with testers, liaise with 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support, working on build pipelines, review latest pipeline CI tools, adopt new technologies that improve your pipeline, maintain ssl certificates, blah blah blah blah to infinity.

This article seems to just mention the coding part. Well that would be easy if all you had to do was learn a language well.

  > I have always been struck by the minimalist knowledge of
  > most developers, when it comes to the programming
  > language  they were using. It took a while, but
  > eventually I accepted the obvious: most developers 
  > don’t need to know much about the language they are
  > using to get their job done.

Sadly, yes.

"Premium mediocrity" is still mediocrity.