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> The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others. Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or positively
by s17n 6y ago
> The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others.
Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or positively correlated across different areas, but time invested is going to be negatively correlated. Hence the stereotype of nerds with poor social skills: building social skills takes time and effort, and time and effort spent on building those skills is time and effort not spent on, eg, improving your programming ability.
Of course, people who have off the charts aptitude will be in the top percentiles across the board. But you're not going to find too many organizations staffed entirely by those people.
- ska 6y ago> But you're not going to find too many organizations staffed entirely by those people. The number you are looking for here is zero, at least for organizations of any size. With a bunch of luck and money you can put a small team together like this; otherwise they are just too scarce.
- briankelly 6y agoYes, you make some good points here but I would argue that in most organizations that skills that make for effective engineering are aligned well with those required for managing. At a certain point, reinvesting into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces improvement in technical skills dramatically. Of course, this is not universal and there are specialties, domains, and organizations that require technical competency and competitiveness above all else, but I don't think that's the general case for most engineers.
- nicoburns 6y ago> At a certain point, reinvesting into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces improvement in technical skills dramatically. True, but this may not be seen as relevant to the individual if they enjoy engineering more than those other things.
- skohan 6y agoIt's fun to be a "star player" developer, but in terms of maximizing your own individual potential, you're always going to be able to produce more value by leading people than by your own output alone. There are some technical mountains to climb which require superlative engineering talent, but in terms of impact it's hard to compete with a leader who is able to coalesce a team or organization effectively towards a single goal.
- skohan 6y agoThe savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up on the technical side, and they're not a better manager than they were a developer but those failures are harder to quantify.
- gcmeplz 6y agoI think even that "poor social skills nerd" engineer trope might be partially an example of Berkson's Paradox [1]. You have to have serious technical chops to compensate for a lack of social skills, and it's hard to see all of the people with weak social skills who aren't engineers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox edit: removing markdown syntax