I worked for a startup once where a mouth-breathing incompetent was promoted to the top of the technical food chain to punish the unofficial VP/Eng with the humiliation of a younger boss. The guy was promoted for literally no other reason and everyone knew it. This made everyone suffer, and his "rearchitecture" almost killed the company. It certainly didn't make me think, "It could happen to me."
When I see idiots getting smothered with praise and rewards while someone like me suffers, it reinforces social status and that I am, for whatever arbitrary and pointless reason, not as high as the smiling imbecile getting showered with gold while the rest of the world gets a golden shower.
That's where I disagree.
Now here's where I agree. I have a lot of performance anxiety and perfectionism. Actually seeing what the state of the art is on many problems is encouraging, insofar as (a) it's not hard to spot improvements, and (b) you feel less embarrassed when you realize that everyone makes mistakes and misses things. I avoided open source for years because I was afraid of showing code to the world, even though I'm objectively a good programmer. I didn't even like to use my real name on the Internet before 25 (although, based on what of my early history is public, that was a good policy.) I'm getting better at that as I get older.
I wouldn't use the word incompetence. There are a lot of trade-offs that result in mediocre software or process and that's only one of them. But it can be refreshing to realize that everyone else has warts, too.
I worked for a startup once where a mouth-breathing incompetent was promoted to the top of the technical food chain to punish the unofficial VP/Eng with the humiliation of a younger boss. The guy was promoted for literally no other reason and everyone knew it. This made everyone suffer, and his "rearchitecture" almost killed the company. It certainly didn't make me think, "It could happen to me."
When I see idiots getting smothered with praise and rewards while someone like me suffers, it reinforces social status and that I am, for whatever arbitrary and pointless reason, not as high as the smiling imbecile getting showered with gold while the rest of the world gets a golden shower.
That's where I disagree.
Now here's where I agree. I have a lot of performance anxiety and perfectionism. Actually seeing what the state of the art is on many problems is encouraging, insofar as (a) it's not hard to spot improvements, and (b) you feel less embarrassed when you realize that everyone makes mistakes and misses things. I avoided open source for years because I was afraid of showing code to the world, even though I'm objectively a good programmer. I didn't even like to use my real name on the Internet before 25 (although, based on what of my early history is public, that was a good policy.) I'm getting better at that as I get older.
I wouldn't use the word incompetence. There are a lot of trade-offs that result in mediocre software or process and that's only one of them. But it can be refreshing to realize that everyone else has warts, too.