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Comment by kache_ | Hacker News Reader

Who would you trust more to be able to build out a piece of software to specification? A greasy nerd with an anime T shirt? Or a senior 3 principal enterprise software engineer

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That's a tough call. I have never been in a position of managing a project like that with IRL, real developers. But based on my experience choosing software on Github for personal use, I'd say the anime avatar is a positive indicator of quality overall, edging out the smiling corporate headshot by a reasonable margin.

There was no context to gp’s question. In a corporate environment you’d for sure trust a shiny headshot. You don’t want to be responsible for a greasy nerd but nobody’s been fired for hiring IBM.

The greasy nerd will be done after a month with something barely working and he will say it’s a masterpiece. It will lack the login functionality but he will say someone else can handle those banalities.

The senior 3 principal software engineer will create a 20-something deep layer cake in Java after 3 years. It will be done perfectly to specification and will be as bland as sand.

No other programmers will want to touch either, and that good folks, is the state of programming.

You're forgetting the outdoorsy profile picture, who will build roughly to spec in half the time using last years tooling. The client will be happy, the code will be maintainable, but whenever something goes wrong they'll be hiking.

Nah, that’s just the senior engineers self-image.

In reality he created a dumpster-fire because he was stressed (bad management) and went on vacation before the fumes took him. ;)

If you do it over and over, you double your salary because suddenly you’re an IT-consultant.

She builds a masterpiece of JavaScript around Yahoo YQL which she uses until Yahoo stops being relevant and YQL is abandoned. Undeterred she finds an abandoned PHP proxy and beats it with a rubber mallet until it functions as a YQL replacement. Satisfied she continues maintaining a single page web app designed around a single undecorated HTML form so plain looking that everyone who sees it asks "How can you have been working on this project for ten years and it still looks like crap?" She hosts her source code on an abandoned wiki farm instead of GitHub and never changes her profile picture. Same blue wig for a whole decade, yeah!

I don't know what these words mean

> senior 3 principal enterprise

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