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But they don't scare away people who are actually qualified but just don't see themselves as 'rockstars' or 'ninjas' or 'the best in the World' - even though th
by michaelochurch 14y ago
But they don't scare away people who are actually qualified but just don't see themselves as 'rockstars' or 'ninjas' or 'the best in the World' - even though they are.
Yah, they select against self-awareness. I think the dirty truth is that thinking you're the best in the world is more important to these companies than actually being good. If you have an outsized self-perception, you'll put up with unreasonable deadlines and terrible conditions on account of pride. That's attractive to someone who's in the business of exploiting naivete.
I'm a mediocre (96-97th percentile) software engineer whose expertise pertains more to the software ecosystem and economy. Knowing it (and myself) as well as I do, I know I'm not the best in the world. I even have that rare trait of knowing what I'm missing, and there's quite a lot in that category. But I'm more than good enough for 99.8% of the tasks that people need done, given reasonable learning time.
- aleyan 14y agoI am curious, how did you assign yourself such a precise percentile (96-97th)?
- michaelochurch 14y agoThe model is here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-autonomy-is-a-1-trillion-issue/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... . I don't claim that it's perfect, but it's the best simple model of devonomics I can come up with. These percentiles are a bit shady, I'll admit, because "programmers" isn't a well-defined group. I have a pretty strong sense that I'm 1.7-1.8 on the software engineer scale but a weak sense of how to define the population. Whether I'm 96th percentile vs. 99th depends more on how tightly or loosely we define "programmer". I tend to think of myself as about 94th because I define it tightly, but I would usually say that I'm 96-97th in congruence with the looser definition that a lot of people use.
- diminoten 14y agoHow is 96-97th percentile mediocre?
- michaelochurch 14y agoCompared to the average programmer, that's about 5-6x. I'd imagine the Google Fellows are 40x or higher. I'm not down on myself at all, but I recognize that I have a long way to go.