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Comment by bombolo | Hacker News Reader

We have the data that dumpster_fire thinks anyone can do coding, which tells us he's not well versed with it.

From there, by experience, people who aren't good juniors aren't good seniors. Good juniors might never become good seniors, but bad juniors won't be good seniors.

I don't see what my life history has to do with anything, when we have all the information right here :)

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What data? I never said anyone can do coding. My spouse sure can't. Code is the easiest part of the job in my company where almost everyone is a genius (sans me). But few enjoy (nor do well with) syncing project goals with other teams. Someone has to do the dirty work while getting dissed by juniors for lack of code. I'm not sure if this experience applies to where you're working at so YMMV.

But I must admit that this is karma. For I have had an almost identical take as you more than a decade ago. Feels like I'm looking in a mirror.

Context is key here, but as a thought experiment- the most profitable businesses can hire with effectively no limit if they choose. FAANG isn't a great proxy for that but it'll do - assume their hiring bar is "can produce excellent code". Then what? Do you just allow everyone to heads down code? Principals and staff engineers rarely contribute directly to features because in their org context, with their expected level of staff - code is cheap and easy. Orchestrating decision making is very hard, and aligning technical to product outcomes is hard. How often are these businesses with huge budgets routinely criticised for poor releases? Yet their overall value remains enormous, because their cores are money printers.

Being an expert in the domain of writing code is relatively easy. Being a domain expert of your businesses value and the tradeoffs its making is very difficult. Just because people like the writing code part of the job doesn't make it the end game for the most valuable skillset.

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