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Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

ravitejakanta.substack.com

31–40 of 72 posts

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#32
post #26

first "code ninjas" now "street fighting" engineers and "martial art" engineers? really? I feel like these monikers are getting a little silly especially since you'd never see the reverse.

LFM 10x rockstar/street-fighter (no LLMs!) SWEs PST

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#33
First, 10x devs are so pathetic to read about, but:

What I like with this article is the difference in how you approach a problem depending on how you are functioning as a human being. Of course it is nowhere near of the real world, but I think all of us can identify people we worked with who are really efficient on both of these "sides".

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#34

Fun analogy, but let's look at the Martial Artist environment > There are basic ground rules (clear requirements) which the opponents (problems) are NOT allowed to break. eg: below the belt punches, (changing priorities every week) etc. Who does get to work in such an environment? I can only think of: * Academia * Artificial environments (e.g. leetcode, coding competitions) * MAYBE very mature products in established…

This is a very common environment in large companies.

If you're working on an existing service and not building new features/functionality (E.g. you're improving scaling or optimizing performance like he mentions) the problem space is usually pretty well defined and you can mostly just put your head down and work.

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#35
post #26

first "code ninjas" now "street fighting" engineers and "martial art" engineers? really? I feel like these monikers are getting a little silly especially since you'd never see the reverse.

> you'd never see the reverse.

Excellent point!

Competitive TKD practitioner: "Approaching this match, aware my opponent was a highly-ranked veteran competitor, I asked myself: what would a techbro do?"

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#36
post #26

first "code ninjas" now "street fighting" engineers and "martial art" engineers? really? I feel like these monikers are getting a little silly especially since you'd never see the reverse.

reminds me a bit of this Elon Musk tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1527774704018280448?s=20

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#38
I really like this dichotomy.

Over time I'm becoming more and more aware of non-skill factors that affect my impact.

I'm definitely more a street fighter, and I feel limited when I'm given martial artist work and there is very little opportunity for street fighter work.

I think it can be very difficult to be a 10x engineer because you have to be in an org that has the right type of work, be on a team that's involved in that work, and be in a role in which you're given that work.

Working at a big company as a SWE (As opposed to e.g. SRE) I've found that the street fighter work is very limited and generally only specific teams and people get to work on it.

Re: Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

#40
“The street fighters mostly have scars and reputation in closed groups. To find them you have to talk to folks in that closed group.”

What closed group would that be, since by definition they are not part of a particular group? A martial artist sounds like the guy that got a product of the ground and would likely be part of the founder group; not likely looking to do it again.

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