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> Would you say that having me on the team is bad? Am I toxic? Without knowing you, or your team, I can't know. I have worked with people like this before, (an
by mugsie 7y ago
> Would you say that having me on the team is bad? Am I toxic?
Without knowing you, or your team, I can't know. I have worked with people like this before, (and done it myself on a few teams), and it is a mixed bag.
> There is no point in pairing me with others, I can't teach them to work like me. However I can teach them to work with the code I wrote, but not to actually solve problems like me.
Again, I don't know your team, but I would doubt there is no-one on your team you can teach. Pairing is not what I was talking - I personally really dislike it, and it doesn't suit me either.
Designing a solution, and helping teammate(s) through implementation of the designs is valuable in this context, and helps lift up other team members.
> If I weren't here they would need to put teams of people to achieve the same or worse results as me, or the work simply wouldn't have been done.
No one is a perfect engineer - the solution you design might not have been produced, but this team existed before you joined, and most likely will after you leave, and it produced solutions.
> Note that I am relatively new on the team ..
This is a key point - I have done things before that were great solutions / libraries that others could use, so I didn't sink much time into docs / comments in the code. No one would need to change the library, just the config and stuff calling it. Which was true for about 2.5 years, at which point we needed to update what should have been something minor. cue me spending a week trying to understand my own code, after someone else tried and gave up. Time is the real judge of how much impact someone has on a team, and which direction it is in.
- username90 7y agoYour judgement doesn't really matter in this situation, the distinguished engineer and the rest of our senior team thinks I am doing an awesome job and they review my changelists and design docs. But I realize there is not much I can do to convince you, in your mind I don't exist so you try to find alternate explanations for everything. > Again, I don't know your team, but I would doubt there is no-one on your team you can teach. What would I teach them? I can go into an unknown codebase in a new domain and solve problems quicker and cleaner than the team who wrote the code. There is no secret knowledge I posses, no bag of tricks I apply, I just see the code, figure out what happens and solve it. If I could reliably teach that to people then I could become the richest man on earth. My skills are good enough to reach a decent position as an IC, nothing to brag about really, but they aren't worthless either.
- mugsie 7y agoDefinitely - I am a internet randomer, nothing I (or others) say should be taken with anything less than a truck full of salt. I would trust that a DE in GOOG knows how to leverage their team in the most efficient / useful way. My point isn't that very smart / productive engineers don't exist (they definitely do), but that the meme of the dev in the corner who sits in the dark, and spews out golden code, without talking to anyone else on the team is actively harmful for our industry, especially in the smaller startup R&D teams that the current batch of publicity about them comes from.