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Every engineer knows the pecking order of who the top performers are. The trick is not determining merit, it's arriving at a consensus about merit without polit
by brianpgordon 12y ago
Every engineer knows the pecking order of who the top performers are. The trick is not determining merit, it's arriving at a consensus about merit without politics hopelessly skewing the result.
- twic 12y agoI don't think this is true. Programmers' values vary. One person may value the number of features implemented over the maintainability of the code, while another may not. One may value finding creative uses for existing components over integrating new components, while another may not. As a result, programmers' evaluations of their own and each other's performance may not be consistent. I once worked somewhere where there was a guy who went round the company getting involved in projects, pushing radical new approaches, not thinking things through properly, writing mediocre code, then moving on to something else. I thought he was a hazard [1]. I recently learned that he's been promoted to 'principal engineer'. [1] Exaggerating somewhat. I like the guy, i think most of his ideas are great, and i respect him a lot. I just worried about the complexity and speed of change exceeding our ability to execute successfully.