> Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related go

> Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related goals. I think that there's a much wider sense to "get ahead" - social climbing and perceived status, as well as in your career. Saying it's about "out-performing competitors" is also a little narrow, and is going to depend on how you measure out-performance. Do you measure it purely by the merits of what you do, or do you measure it purely by how much you get ahead of others, regardless of how that is achieved? > But a developer who uses a library to take care of some task rather than writing custom code from scratch could also be seen to be cutting corners. In this modern world I'd say that knocking something up from scratch, when there's a perfectly good library right there, is the worse behaviour! And I definitely wouldn't consider that corner-cutting.