Engineers often overestimate how bad the “greenfielder” is for the business. In most cases you aren’t selling an elegant technical solution, you’re just selling a solution. And if you don’t ship it ASAP you won’t have time to worry about maintainability, you’ll be bankrupt.
For most businesses, a greenfielder is a 10x engineer.
(This is just an aside, I agree that there exist “true” 10x-ers having had the joy of working with 2 of them over the last 20 years).
I didn't mean just inelegant code, but buggy, incorrect, incomprehensible code that does not meet business requirements and, after being demoed internally to management and getting all the praise, requires significantly more work to get to production level quality.
Anybody can be a 10x if they don't have to solve the problem correctly.
Also, pushing a very low quality product to production too early might just as well kill the company as pushing a great product too late. History knows plenty of late comers who won the market.
And it’s (often comically, always depressingly) necessary for this exact reason. In a recent interview my company conducted, the candidate clearly submitted code they had not written as if it were their own. One might be surprised at how well folks can talk, that cannot actually write relatively trivial code.
> They’ve focused a lot on IQ and personality — both constructs which were designed to be robust, i.e. hard to change, over time.
I thought this was an interesting observation that suggests that a lot of “conclusions” in this space are actually tautologies.
If nurture easily affected personality, we wouldn’t call it “personality” - what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment.
>what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment
I am of the exact opposite opinion, given how much peoples personalities can change given input (think of someone spending all their time alone, and being depressed, changing their lifestyle towards going out every few days to hang out with new friends, and reportedly now having a "cheery personality", or simply someone with no passions discovering theirs, and then feeling like there is meaning to life).
There’s not one “tech industry”, there’s just a bunch of companies and people, all unique, all flawed in their own ways. So join a company, and if you don’t like it, quit and try a different one.
I think it’s reasonable to distinguish reading a book and listening to a book. I don’t particularly think one is better or worse, but certainly they are objectively different.
My sense is that when people talk about gate keeping there’s necessarily an emotional component. In this case I’d guess perhaps there’s a sense that “reading a book” is valuable or prestigious and they don’t want to exclude someone from it.
But to me it’s just an observation of how you consumed content, free of emotional charge.
For most businesses, a greenfielder is a 10x engineer.
(This is just an aside, I agree that there exist “true” 10x-ers having had the joy of working with 2 of them over the last 20 years).