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> I use this as a reminder not to drink my own kool aid. Even if I'm being recognized at being good at something, it's not an excuse to double down on it and pu

> I use this as a reminder not to drink my own kool aid. Even if I'm being recognized at being good at something, it's not an excuse to double down on it and push it too hard. No one is applauded for being judiciously balanced. But for a lot of things it can be positive if recognition motivates you to do more. Like can you ever be too good of an athlete? Too good of a programmer?

JasonFruit 7y ago
Not too good an athlete or too good a programmer, but an athlete complimented on his strength can focus on that to the detriment of his overall performance, and a programmer praised for her architecture can go on to . . . create Java framework-generating frameworks. Knowing your strengths is a good thing, but letting them dominate your identity is not.
ufmace 7y ago
I'm not sure if there even is any universal measure for how good of a programmer you are. There's probably someone who's really good at optimizing the hell out of a really hot loop that absolutely has to be faster, never mind if the code is comprehensible to mere mortals. And somebody who can design and architect a huge, complex enterprise program well enough that a newbie developer can quickly get an idea of what's going on and make contributions. And somebody who can inherit a huge ball of mud and gradually refactor it into something more reasonable while keeping it working the whole time. And somebody who can start a new project and build just the right amount of infrastructure into it at the right time - not so much that you've got some huge over-designed thing for a product with 2 users, and not so little that it becomes impossible to scale when you hit 10k users. And plenty more sub-field besides those. It's easy to be really great at 1 or 2 of those, and not so good at the others.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  Yeah, from the outside it seems like things had to be thinner and lighter to be Apple designed, in the same way that some programmers think they have to architect or optimise or <insert pet obsession> the heck out of everything. If you do it well once you’ll be a hero, but if you do it to everything while losing sight of your actual goals (customer satisfaction, business value, righteous cause) you’ll eventually be cast as a villain.
deleted 7y ago
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JasonFruit 7y ago

Not too good an athlete or too good a programmer, but an athlete complimented on his strength can focus on that to the detriment of his overall performance, and a programmer praised for her architecture can go on to . . . create Java framework-generating frameworks. Knowing your strengths is a good thing, but letting them dominate your identity is not.

ufmace 7y ago

I'm not sure if there even is any universal measure for how good of a programmer you are. There's probably someone who's really good at optimizing the hell out of a really hot loop that absolutely has to be faster, never mind if the code is comprehensible to mere mortals. And somebody who can design and architect a huge, complex enterprise program well enough that a newbie developer can quickly get an idea of what's going on and make contributions. And somebody who can inherit a huge ball of mud and gradually refactor it into something more reasonable while keeping it working the whole time. And somebody who can start a new project and build just the right amount of infrastructure into it at the right time - not so much that you've got some huge over-designed thing for a product with 2 users, and not so little that it becomes impossible to scale when you hit 10k users. And plenty more sub-field besides those. It's easy to be really great at 1 or 2 of those, and not so good at the others.

sudhirj 7y ago
Yeah, from the outside it seems like things had to be thinner and lighter to be Apple designed, in the same way that some programmers think they have to architect or optimise or <insert pet obsession> the heck out of everything. If you do it well once you’ll be a hero, but if you do it to everything while losing sight of your actual goals (customer satisfaction, business value, righteous cause) you’ll eventually be cast as a villain.

deleted 7y ago

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