Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my thought too. The problem here isnt with "superstar developers", it's with people who don't understand the work trying to label people as such and doing a piss-poor job. Someone who doesn't write code others can read isn't even a mediocre developer, hes a bad one. It's arguments like these that make me very skeptical of the claims that 10x developers don't exist, as I've yet to hear such an argument that d…
> That being said, I fully agree with the article's framing of this view as simply saying that talented developers need a healthy working environment in order to reach their potential. The flip side being, a talented developer might not want to join a company where an engineer like that has been the top dog (and the people below haven’t been around enough to have an idea what being a senior engineer is about). It jus…
There have been a couple of teams I've been in a position of technical leadership and/or been better than the rest of the team on all or some relevant technical axes. In all of these cases, even if I was being 100% selfish, I would still _want_ to grow the people under me, since the stuff they grow into is the stuff I want to grow out of. As a concrete example, I'm currently the TL of a team, with a primary personal focus on ML, and it's been a huge win-win to hand off ML system maintenance tasks to non-ML engineers. These tasks provide them valuable exposure to the way ML production systems work, familiarity with ML workflows/tooling, and practice reasoning about ML systems. But they also free my time up of tedious, straightforward little tasks, to work on things that challenge me more. It's win-win-win, as the company is getting a more efficient and productive allocation of resources too.