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The topic of information disparity is highly interesting to me. Knowledge workers in general have very interesting challenge relating to other workers at differ

The topic of information disparity is highly interesting to me. Knowledge workers in general have very interesting challenge relating to other workers at different expertise levels, & to others in the org. Each person is somewhat rather isolated in their own knowledge domain & that is the highest loss transmission medium I can think of. I think there's a lot good points for consideration in this article. It mainly favors a KISS approach. Reciprocally, I hate to say it, but I also feel like there's an overly compulsive YAGNI behavior (you ain't gonna need it). Developers are drawn like hawks to a possible whiff of over complexity, & will descend for the kill. Ambition is talked down & avoided by many voices in most orgs, even when the plans can be quite sound. What can be really sad is that some devs will convince themselves of doing all kinds of absurd highly compromised labor that they know is a better choice than a slightly more adventurous route that requires some discovery & exploration of known unknowns. The last principle engineer we had kept demanding to make Api calls for a migration because they didnt feel very comfortable with sql, but my heavens the work we went through to do the job thousands of times slower to bend to that was staggering. People will tool away doing things poorly, slowly, repetitively, glued to the safe path, and not advancing. Becoming a really great developer is hanging in the balance, between letting yourself spiral & lose traction/understanding/focus/being-overwhelmed, and between being relentlessly curious & hungry to learn all the options, how each option works. Finding stuff out is the job, at least as much as doing the work, but training ourselves towards initiative is the hardest practice of all. There's plenty of other ways to be a very fine developer too. Not everyone has to sign up to contort themselves, to a predisposition of being always staying slightly uncomfortable. But those that can start to lean in & appreciate the endless possible quest-opportunities about us, & who can latch on & dive deep on an option, courageously go find out and see: those folks tend to do very very well. (If placed in an environment where this let's say "ideal" behavior isnt resisted by the org.) It's an amazing life.

physicles 4y ago
> Developers are drawn like hawks to a possible whiff of over complexity In my experience, juniors tend to pick solutions without considering complexity and people factors — at least, I did. There’s a very good reason to avoid over-complexity: if you have too much of it, it kills your velocity. > to a predisposition of being always staying slightly uncomfortable I love that feeling of always moving forward. Tech that you didn’t know about a year ago, is now part of your normal workflow. That feeling when you start exploring something totally new and it takes a week to get comfortable with hello world, and a month (or years) to learn exactly where it should fit and what the sharp edges are.

physicles 4y ago

> Developers are drawn like hawks to a possible whiff of over complexity In my experience, juniors tend to pick solutions without considering complexity and people factors — at least, I did. There’s a very good reason to avoid over-complexity: if you have too much of it, it kills your velocity. > to a predisposition of being always staying slightly uncomfortable I love that feeling of always moving forward. Tech that you didn’t know about a year ago, is now part of your normal workflow. That feeling when you start exploring something totally new and it takes a week to get comfortable with hello world, and a month (or years) to learn exactly where it should fit and what the sharp edges are.