Comment by throwanem
6 years ago
As a side note, gotta say, scare-quoting "collaborate" seems like a pretty weird flex in a time when everybody's stuck working from home whether they prefer it that way or not. Maybe you prefer to work entirely within a silo, rarely dealing with colleagues in the course of your day-to-day. Most don't, nor should they. Most kinds of work, even the kinds of work that we do, really aren't better done that way.
I worked in a silo for years, not so much by choice as by virtue of the fact that my company at that time could not afford another engineer of similar capability. I got by well enough, thanks in no small part to a youthful talent for improvisation, and the fact that things were simpler then. I wouldn't go back to that life if you paid me. But even if I would, I couldn't. Times change, and the time of the engineer as hermit has largely passed. There are things about it I miss, sure. But I don't miss them so much that I want to imperil my ability to keep earning a living by ignoring that the world has moved on.
edit: Of course, this ignores the difference between modern dev work, and modern sysadmin (as opposed to devops) work. It probably doesn't make much sense to analyze the latter as though it were the former. Or vice versa.
In my experience, there are a lot of developers who get really uncomfortable once they start having more developers working on their code. There’s a lot of effort which has to be done documenting the code: Either by explaining how the code runs to other engineers on the team, or by having documentation showing how the code is arranged and runs, something a lot of engineers are not very good at doing.
It takes a lot of talent to do collaboration well, because it means having to let go of the code being “my code”, and it means having a lot of people skills, such as the ability to empathize with how someone not familiar with the code will see things, and how to write documentation about the code structure so that things can be in maintainable “boxes”.
I mean, that's fair, but growing past that is also part of learning to be an effective engineer. It's not always a comfortable process - it sure wasn't at first for me! - but that's often true of any kind of growth.
I think it's better described as a skill than as a talent, too. The former is learned, the latter innate, and as someone with absolutely none of the latter, I can attest that the former is attainable nonetheless.
You read a lot more into that that I intended.
I'm suffering some fatigue w/ the word "collaborate" being thrown around in marketing collateral right now. You used the word several times, and I engaged my "marketing avoidance" mode.
That's fair. My circle includes several acquaintances who prefer talking loudly about how engineering should be, to accomplishing much of anything in the realm. So, similarly overfitting, I engaged a mode of my own.