Hate to break it to you, but well trained software engineers create terrible software too. Everywhere I’ve worked had some really boneheaded things going on. A

Hate to break it to you, but well trained software engineers create terrible software too. Everywhere I’ve worked had some really boneheaded things going on. A reasonable person showing up with a keen eye to making things better can contribute a lot. We had one software engineer at YouTube just hunted down and deleted unused code. This reduced the maintenance complexity and generally made the codebase more maintainable. Was she a rockstar? Probably not, but every day she made the codebase better. For the most part, showing up, being reasonable and having a handle on the basics goes a long way. I’ll take that over a hotshot working on the wrong problem any day. There’s nothing like the smart man monkey trap to make otherwise intelligent people cause more harm than good.