Comment by sime2009
5 years ago
I've seen plenty of people in IT with mediocre skills having no problem at all finding new jobs. I've also seen talented developers stay in the same place for a long time.
I'm much more willing to believe that the quality of engineers at an organisation has more to do with the organisation itself and the sector.
I've noticed that some people hold a grudge against mediocrity that I don't entertain, and yet they don't know what to do with belligerent incompetence and so they try not to think about it, whereas I can't stop thinking about it.
Overqualified people working on a project can produce some heinous code. What I want as a team lead is to know how far I can trust people with different tasks, figure out who can be stretched in what directions, make a stab at scheduling the work out to try to minmax that equation, course correct a few times, observe outcomes and root causes and try to put safety equipment or process in the places where things start to go wrong the most.
You can get a lot of important if boring work done by 'average' or 'below average' developers - as long as they don't suffer from Dunning-Kruger.
Performance is on a bell curve (and not static). If you're trying to run your project like you only have to deal with the top 20%, well guess what, you're still going to have a bell curve. If you're in charge of any strategy and you won't acknowledge this, then you are the biggest idiot in the room, and I don't want to hear your opinions on who the second biggest idiot is.
> Overqualified people working on a project can produce some heinous code
> You can get a lot of important if boring work done by 'average' or 'below average' developers
This is why google developed the go programming language - dumb enough that people can't build overly complex abstractions, but capable enough that average engineers can churn out productive work.