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Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

This is what "top down" coding looks like. In "top down" coding you're told what to do by the boss, given too short a timeline, and forced to push something out the door.

Congratulations on figuring out how to create a massive churn rate among your actual good engineers.

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Give me engineers who value solving problems, sometimes with code, over “good” engineers every single day of the week.

I understand you're characterizing the word "good" as some bad definition of "good" used by some subset of others, but your quotation marks are doing a Herculean amount of lifting (i.e. it's hard to tell what you're saying). I think most people would consider "engineers who value solving problems" as "good" and vice versa.

I'm just using "good" here as defined by the parent comment I replied to, to make the point that I believe the engineers as he described wouldn't value solving problems as much as they value "good" code.

It goes hand in hand. We're still talking about engineers here, not pure computer scientists. And if we want to call them "engineers" they should understand short and long term ramifications of any decision they make, something reflected in the code they are responsible for. Few other engineers would ever accept a paradigm of "make fast, re-implement fast", but since that's a luxury a software engineer has, it comes more down to understanding what the business needs and using the right tools.

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