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"I ran into this early in my career when a senior engineer at a startup reviewed my Python PR for operating on a CSV dataset and insisted I rewrite it in Pandas for performance."

Did a performance problem exist?

If not, then I would never promote that person to senior engineer. A working program should only be re-engineered for performance if it wasn't meeting the performance contract agreed upon when the program was written.

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No, the performance problem didn’t exist. The engineer in question was really smart in many other areas, but “engineering” per se wasn’t his strength. Things are fast-and-loose in startup world.

Yes, startups are the wild, wild, west. I spent from 1994-97 in startups. I loved the lack of bureaucracy. But we spent too much time in firefighting mode. Through trial-and-error I found medium-small organizations in the non-profit world my best fit.

Early on I had a senior guy mentoring me on a project involving a tool called PowerBuilder. He chose a design that didn't fit the problem-space well but it fit the "PowerBuilder Best Practices" so he implemented it. The performance was abominable and he should have known it would be: he too was a smart guy. But he had a hard time seeing "big picture" design.

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