Had to show another the door because he was so disgruntled that we were coding in a paradigm so beneath his intelligence that his toxicity and moping permeated across the entire team.
Like dude do you realize what we are doing here...
If they were that smart I don't think they would have ended up here next to me programming CRUD backends for a mobile app.
I think many folks in eng are used to being told they were smart either in high school or college or an early job and it became part of their self image. They might be smart but they are tossed into a field of people who come from similar backgrounds and now they are average which just doesnt fit with their self image.
First 10 years of my career, I felt bearded Unix Sysadmins were the smartest people I knew :->, whereas I was fully Dilbertian in view of The Evil Pointy Haired Management.
I've been trying to develop "PeopleSmarts" or "Soft Skills" or "Emotional Intelligence" or whatever we call it last 5+ years, and it's... just as much harder and more challenging than technical skillset, as my mentors always told me and I never believed. It's a far fuzzier, squishier, less certain set of problems, and there just isn't O'Reilly-quality literature out there :P.
I have confidence that given time I can learn technical concepts or figure out technical issues.
I think path in front of me to be soft-skill-savvy, emotionally intelligent, is going to be long and hard.
So, how to properly setup LUNs on AIX or optimize a SQL statement or design an ERP architecture is one kind of smart; how to work with your own team to figure out productive way forward is another kind of smart; how to work with client and business and management stakeholders to satisfy their actual needs is another important kind of smart.
It's not enough to learn about higher kinded types, you've got to know when forcing them into a place is a bad idea.
I've seen a bunch of devs that can't help but write unmaintainable code because they learn a new programming concept and decide to shoehorn it in everywhere. This happens even with basic concepts like generics.
The same thing happens to devs that aren't curious. If they never learn newer programming concepts then every problem looks like a nail and inheritance is the hammer. Those systems equally become unmaintainable because clearer programming paradigms would make the code more readable and maintainable.
It’s understandable in pieces… but also really hard to scale/refactor/replace after it has grown enough.
I think we put a little to much stock in "smart" developers. What you describe sounds more like a "wise" developer - as in "a clever developer knows how to map-reduce, a wise developer knows not to put it in a fruit salad"...
It’s hard enough to figure out who has smarts, let alone real flexibility:(
Good for him.
But I agree, there's a difference between code that veers towards obfuscation and code that employs techniques someone just hasn't learned yet.
I found this resonating with my own thoughts towards LeetCode questions, which are at odds with most on HN. Unfamiliarity makes people dismiss them as requiring rote memorization, where's most of them are a matter of figuring out the nature of the problem space, and choosing the right data structure and algorithms
Yes, giving them a CRUD app where they build their own frameworks because they're bored and something about the existing frameworks is sub-optimal probably will end up adding net negative value as they introduce complexity all the other developers now need to understand.
But if you have a ton of PHP code and running at such scale that you need to create a new PHP engine to optimize all of your existing code and save millions of dollars on your infrastructure costs, a "smart person" just might fit the bill.
One important thing to realize is that the challenge doesn't have to be in the obvious place.
Having a smart person who is really interested in solving the business problem you are trying to solve will make things better all over the place.
Having a smart person who is uninterested in the business problem you are trying to solve and looking for intellectual stimulation in the technical stack - well, if you aren't doing something "interesting" it's probably going to go poorly.
And as much as my personal spiritual home is the MEAN stack, the Haskell/ML route seems to attract more people who know heavier CS than I do.
Why wouldn't they use Cython, any of the scipy/numpy ecosystem, or Numba?
"the Haskell/ML route seems to attract more people who know heavier CS than I do"
Why is someone else knowing heavier CS than you do a good heuristic for a tool being the right long-term solution for a job to be done?
1. I’m likely to learn a lot from them.
2. The harder the problem is that the team can realistically tackle the more likely the team is to do something novel/interesting/beneficial/profitable, ideally all at once.
Clever people implement solutions nobody else can - they know the tools they're using inside and out and can do amazing things.
Smart people realize the things they build must last longer than themselves. They implement solutions those that come after them can understand and maintain. Sometimes those solutions are clever. If the problem domain is hard, then the solution is necessarily clever.
Really smart people can be some combination of idealistic, lazy or simply in a context that diminishes their willpower. Therefore their smarts don't really "manifest" in that particular context. I've worked with lots of people who I thought were bozos because they sucked at their programming job but they were clearly smart about other things.
But if you stick a smart person on a boring problem they'll probably write clever solutions for the boring problem.
Eh, they are not really 'smart' now, are they?
Sure, they may be mathematically gifted or what have you. But if your definition of 'smart' includes the individual's performance when responding to their world around they, they definitely were not :)
The 'smartest' (according to my own definitions and biases) developer I know also happened to write the most beautiful and easy to understand code. He could write clever one-liners. He knew better not to.
I think intelligence is as much a choice as it is a built in trait in many ways and the people who like Haskell are the ones who enjoy solving very difficult abstract problems over just getting stuff done. The world needs some people like that but most projects don't.
