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Every life lesson that you learn from experience is just a statistically irrelevant anecdote and results in the refinement of a crude heuristic or generalization mechanism for your limited human brain. Never did this fabricated fable state or even hint that this was the way all enterprise teams and all hackers are like. That, my friend, is the straw man argument coming from you.

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If this fable didn't hint at that, what was its point?

That convincing management regardless of your productive output is what matters at the end of the day? Perhaps at some organizations, but it's not a particularly accurate, nuanced world view.

I doubt this story would be conveyed in reverse -- the stereotypical "rockstar hacker" produces vast reams of code that will fail catastrophically, but comes out ahead by, upon 'completion', immediately pushing responsibility for the disastrously buggy code to the "stodgy" enterprise engineers who get called in to maintain the project. The "rockstar" moves on to the next project, where he'll repeat this performance, and the stodgy developers get poor performance reviews.

I actually thought the story hinted at the opposite: that individual programmers who from the outside may look like slackers can produce good, simple code and that process isn't everything.

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