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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

> It’s something that comes hard to senior developers, because we’re all aware that every result is a team win. So when you’re asked about a project you worked on, you’ll tell the story all in first person plural: ‘we had to solve this problem, so we decided to use this approach’.

As you said, good outcomes are team efforts. Even your best developer is not going to do anything great if he’s fixing bugs. Less senior developers prop up the senior ones. So why would we talk as though our specific roles were ‘special’?

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> Even your best developer is not going to do anything great if he’s fixing bugs.

Honestly, I wish this mentality would go away. Maybe software in general is so "barely shippable" shitty because 95% of everyone's engineering effort is spent on cranking out features rather than fixing bugs and improving stability/performance. Somehow, feature work is glamorous and gets you promoted and quality is seen as boring, dead-end work. This really needs to change.

The best developers are the ones you can give the hardest bugs to and trust they get them done. The ones where the principal engineers see someone heading for your desk and jumps up to figure out why - stopping your interruptions is far more important than anything else! (You can't give these to the principal engineer because his job is to be interrupted)

> So why would we talk as though our specific roles were ‘special’?

Because you’re selling yourself. Interviews are sales. You are the product. Not your team, not your boss, not your company. You.

Wouldn't that be just a round about way to lie about yourself?

No, don’t lie. Highlight your accomplishments.

Yes they wouldn’t be possible without the inputs of others and yet you still did something. What was it?

If you can’t answer that question then this project shouldn’t be on your resume and you shouldn’t bring it up in interviews.

Why do you have that in quotes? They did not say senior roles are special.

They're just saying: acknowledge team wins, but you still did something individually, be able to explain what that thing was in detail.

The OP was frustrated about having to prompt interviewees to talk about their accomplishments and how they always talk in first person plural.

I am in support of this being the natural way of thinking. No one could do what they did without support.

I am also vaguely suggesting that maybe every company’s process of promoting, hiring or giving out bonuses is wrong.

I don't think many people are opposed to that way of thinking. But as a responsible team member you still have individual duties and you need to be able to explain them.

Right, a staff level engineer would have been the one to organize the team so the junior developers are picking up the easier stuff and learning the system.

If you think team dynamics just magically emerge that way around a complex technical project, you weren’t as senior as you thought.

I sort of hate the idea that senior people design and write stuff, while junior people fix bugs. In my experience this leads to developing code where "someone else will fix it up if there are problems" and in the long-run, is not good for the senior people (they get sloppy) or the junior people (they're not happy fixing others' crappy code).

I think a lot better model is ownership of code. If you write something, it's yours. If it breaks, it's yours to fix. If someone wants to change the design of it, they go through you first. Maybe eventually someone changes it so much that they own it.

What about the idea that senior people design stuff but then hand it off to junior people to write and then coach them through the bug fixing and refinement? (Honest question; doesn't seem like there's much of this where I work and I'm considering trying to introduce it because it seems to me like a good way to leverage the senior folks' skills while also transferring them to more junior folks, but I'm wondering whether there is some kind of taboo against it or something else that I'm missing)

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