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Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level
by Grimm1 6y ago
Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level.
So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
- pdpi 6y ago> have no business being there as I would evaluate it. That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good". For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
- Grimm1 6y agoOh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea of merit -- it's not an objective quality. Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.