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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

I think the author was exaggerating a bit, or perhaps is more sensitive to other peoples' opinions than most (e.g. the bit about crying in the bathroom). In the past I have definitely worked at companies where "web developer" was a completely different job title than "software engineer" (back-end developer), and paid less money. Definitely second-class citizens. The industry seems to have turned a corner with the advent of single page app frameworks, npm, etc, and everyone these days seems to be "full stack", but I'm sure there are still plenty of companies out there still doing it this way.

Also, from what I can tell people in academia and certain open source circles are brutal to each other (e.g. Linus Torvalds). I'm sure they would shit on the work I do every day... but I'm too busy to care.

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Weird (to me). I don’t care what a coworker makes or what their title is. I don’t even care what my own title is. When a former employer let me choose the title for my business card I went with “problem solver.” All I really care about is having competent coworkers with integrity who are respectful to each other. It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It most certainly is, when you have to work with and clean up the mess.

Much like there is the notion of "10x" programmers, there are also "-10x" ones. Unfortunately they can stay around for a surprisingly long time.

What I was trying to say by “value” is that it’s not my job to determine the worth of a particular position to a company. i.e. it’s above my pay grade to decide what a web developer is worth vs a backend engineer, etc.

Judging the quality of someone’s work _may_ be my job if I’m asked for peer feedback, but even there I disagree. I feel it should be up to a manager to determine whether his or her reports are doing good work. (I’m not a fan of peer feedback for a variety of reasons.)

Of course if someone is incompetent, that’s a different matter. How I’d deal with that is too circumstance specific to outline here. I’ve been fortunate in that I can only recall a few such people.

Shouldn't everyone be judging (and improving) the quality of everyone's work in a team, if you want the project to succeed ? How is a manager to judge the quality of technical output other than peer feedback ?

Sure, code reviews, architectural review, etc. First line managers should be technical enough to know whether their reports are doing a good job.

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