Another hitch for people to tie their boats to a sinking ship.
62 karma · joined September 23, 2015
Sounds pretty much like everyone I know.
As I've grown I find soft/interpersonal skills to matter more and more and in many ways, now that I'm a seasoned engineer, trump the hard skills in terms of what impacts my career trajectory. I'd advise any junior/intermediate career software engineer to take the advice from this article seriously.
I've also used JIRA where it is ONLY managed by the engineers and also when it is owned and managed by large teams of non-engineering stakeholders.
My 2-cents: When a project isn't going well it's the team that is deficient, not the software, in 99% of cases. Most of these tools can be customized (and combined with other tools if needed) to create something that works... and this varies on a project by project basis. It's not about the tool... it's about how pragmatic and adaptive a team can be as they apply them. Panaceas do not exist in this problem space.
It was also not my point at all that an engineer that knows how to build a construct like an IO monad in Scala, but doesn't understand traits/abstract classes (which would be funny and hard to find I imagine) would be preferable to anyone else...
And furthermore, I agree that we live in a world where teams and projects get hosed by architect astronauts. But that isn't the point either...
The point, my angry friend, is nothing more than the observation that I, with my skill set, would do exactly what I said: Be unable to answer all those correctly in an interview, and in the process I would not have been asked anything that would flesh out many of the other skills I have. Skills relevant to the language in question and, arguably, more empowering to an organization than those listed.
1. I can NOT off the cuff answer those all correctly (at least not without a little Googling).
2. I can, largely off the cuff, implement an IO monad in Scala using higher-kinded types and compose instances of them in a hand rolled non-blocking server.
> "You can indeed become enormously wealthy and still be a good person just playing the game. That point needed to be raised because, as Orson Welles once pointed out, everybody has their reasons. Very few people are thinking as a sociopath might think, that nothing matters to me."
Glad to see this sentiment is a driver in this book's dystopia. A little slice of healing for our political climate.
Everything we or other life forms do comes from an attempt to make an improvement. Be it selfish or altruistic, it is always to alter some state of the world for a perceived benefit.
But our competence varies. So we all fall on some spectrum of competence in any given endeavor no matter how small. From this variation and rank we can derive hierarchy.
This transcends all species and their traits.
It isn't hard to extract similar hierarchies from other species...including humans.
But to say nature has no hierarchy? I suppose "hierarchy" can mean many things. But in my case I mean fitness and selection for it. The most fit are at the top. Nature tends to select for those better suited to their environment. And those best suited thrive and push the success of us all forward. It is how you got here and have what you have. Intellectual, emotional, and physical traits are all subject to this selection. The thriving academics with the most freedom are closer to the top. The best employees (however you want to define employee) tend to be given the most freedom and trust.
But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature. The exceptionally strong and bright animals have more freedom in why they choose to do and how they do it. And that system has worked to get us all this far.
The system this article is pushing against isn't fun for many but inevitable. The further you are from the top the more subject your performance is to poor evaluation schemes conceived by those far from the top too.