Comment by nonameiguess

Something that has been interesting to me for my entire life was the geek/jock cultural split in the US that seemed to crescendo in the 80s with the rise of popular nerd films and then the 90s when software started taking over the world. Being a pretty athletic kid who lettered in four sports, won a state championship, but also won math tournaments and spelling bees, it felt artificial to me. Plenty of high-level athletes have always been into video games, anime, and comic books, and are just as smart as people who can't run without tripping themselves and never learned to throw or catch any kind of ball.

Now it seems like it's come circle from the other direction, too. We always had fandom elements in computing nerd culture. Editor wars. Language wars. Framework wars. Now that software tooling has become nearly human-like, mercurial, unpredictable, inconsistent in performance and experience from week to week, software developers have turned into sports scouts and ESPN talking heads, going so far as to make continually updating live power rankings the way commentators try to predict in season which team is looking most like they'll win the championship that year. You're in the position talent evaluators were in roughly the late 90s, relying mostly on eye test and rough proxy measures of raw potential. Simon Willison applies the pelican test the way draft combines put athletes through shuttle drills and test vertical leap to try and predict how well they'll do in real gameplay.

It leaves me wondering when we'll have the Bill James style analytics breakthrough in software talent evaluation or if such a thing is even possible. At least with athletes, practice can make them better and injury and age can make them worse, but you can't just silently swap out an entirely different mind and body under the same name and face. You guys are trying to assess the performance of constantly moving targets that can and do change capabilities and characteristics on a daily basis.