Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"

The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!

> Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"

From my life experience, the claimed statement actually does have some truth in it: software engineers experience a lot more bullshit marketing than other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking, thus they, in my experience, have indeed become more immune to exaggerated marketing claims.

Also it fits my experience that software engineers are much more vocal about calling out bullshit (just consider the "bullshit bingo" game) than other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking, thus based on the audience reactions alone, any salesman would likely indeed come to the conclusion that software engineers are the most skeptical audience.

"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week."

plus plus plus plus plus to this.

This is the key message in my opinion. I've worked with wonderful software developers who can accomplish far more than others (as well as a few who are a net drain on the team.) The key is to craft an organization that allows anyone with a minimum skillset to be successful. At least on the team that I'm currently in, this means a well-defined organization with clearly defined limits of what they should and should not do. This is with respect to customers and also internally.

If this were true then software engineering jobs would have all already been offshored.

Software is much closer to a competitive race where small improvements in ability give completely outsized returns.

You're both right, but in different contexts.

And who leads and sets the vision. A committee of “average” engineers?

I want to believe, but has anymore ever worked at such great organization?

I have twice, but it's always huge companies ($billions and 100k employees) who has an established business, and some kind of monopoly which could not threaten the survival of the company.

And to achieve this the organization only requires exceptional leaders...

This book legit changed the things I notice as I move about the natural world. Couldn't recommend it more.

more of this kinda stuff, please! :)

Anybody have something like this at their company?

Who are you and what are you trying to sell me? :)

I don't know that they're becoming "extinct", but the value some of them once provided, in my experience, has been greatly diminished by saas-enabled marketing infiltration. I mean, there are tools out there that will send you an alert when certain phrases are mentioned on sites like Reddit so that you can jump in and comment in a way that "surreptitiously" promotes your product, and companies are paying money for these tools. Gross, gross, gross.

R.I.P Mr Graeber. What a gem of a thinker.

Agreed. I frequently disagree with his conclusions, but he never fails to make me see things in a new light.

One of the few academics who was willing to propose radically new ideas which nobody had an economic incentive to pursue.

We can apply logic to anything and everything. What makes computer science singularly deserving of this label?

Computer science studies and invents logic whereas the math community has departed from logic as a whole.

Computer science "invents" logic? What do you mean by that?

Are you familiar with the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic? Or formal semantics, which utilizes tools from the fields of symbolic logic and mathematics to generate (very precise) theories around the semantics of natural language expressions?

I would say that the working, active logicians study and invent logics, not the computer scientists, who work with the narrower field of objects known as models of computation.

In reality, logicians and type theorists are employed in the computer science department and rightfully so. The whole field of computer science should upgrade with such influx of talent.

"At a high level, our informants described great software engineers as people who are passionate about their jobs."

Curious to know this group's thoughts: Do you believe that passion is NECESSARY to be a "great" software engineer?

To some degree.

Or, perhaps, consider it in reverse. If you don't have passion, if you don't care about the software, if it's just a 9-to-5 job to you, how likely are you to do great work?

I don't think you have to have an obsessive, does-nothing-but-code-and-sleep kind of passion to be great, or at least moderately great. But you have to care about your craft, about the quality of the code you produce, or you won't produce anything approaching "great".

Yes. Earlier in careers, passion can lead to more time and energy towards growth, which is a strong contributor to becoming a great engineer.

For more experienced engineers, I think about it as skill vs motivation. In theory one doesn't need motivation to do great work. In practice, I haven't seen great work from folks with high skill but low motivation.

I doubt passion is needed to execute at a "great" level once the skills are built to do so, but I think it's pretty likely that passion play an important role at building the capability

In my experience with the people that I have worked with over many years, the best software engineers were always that ones that had a personal interest in software and programming and not just "assembly-line programmers". So I do think that passion plays a large role in the difference between adequate/good and "great".

yes for sure. you can't be good at something you don't give a shit about and only there for money.

Also being a "great software engineer" doesn't get you money more than being "good at people" so ppl who are great are doing it for love .