My Colleague Julius

Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.

I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing.

Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told.

Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new features?

You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that others are the ones who can't keep up with him?

So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.

I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like Pete and how you call such people.

At the risk of getting too meta, I feel like lots of folks will get the gist of Julius and check out from the article…

…missing the twist.

So as a TLDR, I’ll say that Julius is a peer of the author who is polished but uncomprehending, often spouting convincing-sounding nonsense.

And here in 2024 we not only have folks like that to contend with, but also have polished AI output being forced at us from every direction.

What a world we have ahead of us with Internet-scale automated uncomprehending nonsense

That's great, I really enjoyed that.

I've met my fair share of Juliuses, both in college and in work. It often really made me question why I even care about what I do.

In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work.

The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions.

Then turn into your "Pete" when they get promoted...