4 ms·

You can be a successful dev without doing a good job. Many people just want to do a good job and don't particularly care about being "successful." It's not tha

by usea 4y ago

You can be a successful dev without doing a good job. Many people just want to do a good job and don't particularly care about being "successful." It's not that your coworkers don't know you can get away with doing a bad job, it's that they're not motivated by the same things that you are. It's true that in some contexts, throwing npm libraries at the wall to see what sticks is delivering organizational value. In many others, it's negative value.

Zetice 4y ago
That's the point; there is no "successful dev" without "doing a good job". The folks who don't care about being "successful" are not "good devs", because they're not clear about why their job exists in the first place. You don't really get to define success for your role without your organization's input, and when you overly focus on the engineering to the exclusion of delivering value, you are not acting as a "good dev".
- usea 4y ago
  Hitting metrics or whatever else causes you to be successful in your organization is not the same as doing a good job. It is possible, for example, to get raises and promotions while ruining your company and destroying all value for your customers. It is also possible to be the only one delivering any value, while actively working against organizational goals. Management, or whoever else is defining success for you, is not infallible. Intrinsic motivation is a real thing. You don't have to let your boss or your parents or your teachers tell you what it means to do a good job. You can decide for yourself. People who just grab libraries from npm and don't take their imports seriously are not the ones delivering value in the places where I've worked. Far from it. Those are the people whose "work" you have to re-do weeks or months later because it didn't actually deliver value. Often times it doesn't work at all, never worked, never compiled, etc. But those people are long gone because they're busy being "successful" and moving on to other roles, creating negative value in other parts of the organization. You say that only successful people know why their job exists, and unsuccessful people are blind to organizational value. In my experience, you couldn't be more wrong.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Go one step further; what are the metrics trying to measure? Who set those metrics and why? What are the smallest number of actions needed to deliver value to the folks who provide revenue to the company? Effective developers know the answers to those questions. What else they do is quite varied, and some effective developers care about things like "should we use lodash or not?" But other effective developers don't. I didn't say "only successful people" do anything. What I said was you don't have to care about how lodash works or be concerned about importing it vs. rolling your own to be an effective developer.

by usea 4y ago

Zetice 4y ago

That's the point; there is no "successful dev" without "doing a good job". The folks who don't care about being "successful" are not "good devs", because they're not clear about why their job exists in the first place. You don't really get to define success for your role without your organization's input, and when you overly focus on the engineering to the exclusion of delivering value, you are not acting as a "good dev".

usea 4y ago
Hitting metrics or whatever else causes you to be successful in your organization is not the same as doing a good job. It is possible, for example, to get raises and promotions while ruining your company and destroying all value for your customers. It is also possible to be the only one delivering any value, while actively working against organizational goals. Management, or whoever else is defining success for you, is not infallible. Intrinsic motivation is a real thing. You don't have to let your boss or your parents or your teachers tell you what it means to do a good job. You can decide for yourself. People who just grab libraries from npm and don't take their imports seriously are not the ones delivering value in the places where I've worked. Far from it. Those are the people whose "work" you have to re-do weeks or months later because it didn't actually deliver value. Often times it doesn't work at all, never worked, never compiled, etc. But those people are long gone because they're busy being "successful" and moving on to other roles, creating negative value in other parts of the organization. You say that only successful people know why their job exists, and unsuccessful people are blind to organizational value. In my experience, you couldn't be more wrong.
- Zetice 4y ago
  Go one step further; what are the metrics trying to measure? Who set those metrics and why? What are the smallest number of actions needed to deliver value to the folks who provide revenue to the company? Effective developers know the answers to those questions. What else they do is quite varied, and some effective developers care about things like "should we use lodash or not?" But other effective developers don't. I didn't say "only successful people" do anything. What I said was you don't have to care about how lodash works or be concerned about importing it vs. rolling your own to be an effective developer.