The best programmers I know

I agree with all but one of his assertions.

>Don’t Guess

If you are working on critical software like code running in a rocket or medical device, sure, never guess is mandatory.

But I and many other people can be in a hurry. We have to or want to move fast where it matters. I don't have the time to research every single detail nor I am interested in knowing every single detail.

I am mostly interested in building something or solving a problem, I don't care about implementation details as much. Sure, some times details do matter a lot but it's a part of the job to have an understanding of which details matter more and which matter less.

So, I don't guess out of laziness, but because I have things that are more important and more interesting to do and time is a finite resource.

Many decisions can be reverted with minimal loss if they will be proved wrong in the future. Bugs can be solved with ease.

I'm not saying to move fast and move things, but learn how to do the right trade-offs and making educated guesses is a valuable tool.

So I would add another assertion to the the list:

Learn to value time, don't procrastinate, avoid analysis paralysis.

> The best devs talk to principal engineers and junior devs alike. There is no hierarchy. They try to learn from everyone, young and old. The newcomers often aren’t entrenched in office politics yet and still have a fresh mind. They don’t know why things are hard and so they propose creative solutions. Maybe the obstacles from the past are no more, which makes these people a great source of inspiration.

That's how you can work against the normalization of deviance. Never dismiss new people commenting on what you may doing wrong for no reason. Yes, you've been doing X in an unusual way and no accident happened still; but there's a reason you should not do it this way and it may cost a lot to relearn it by experiencing it.

And same thing with old rules for which no one has an idea of why they exist but are still followed. Any rule should have an explanation for its existence and their relevance checked periodically.

Reading documentation - if you are junior take time to go one level deeper to understand / fix issues you have. Then read also stuff adjacent to that.

By trying to read some documentation like a book from cover to cover will be waste of time.

This is great advice. Unfortunately, all these AI tools make it far too easy for beginners to not follow it. I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

Although these are all qualities of good devs, they are qualities of a lot of middling devs too. Reading the documentation and understanding the tooling isn't that rare.

Although I will say the "Status Doesn’t Matter" thing is a symptom not a cause. If there isn't any question you're one of the best then status doesn't matter - people know you're the best and there is no need to remind them. The people who fight strongly for status are the insecure ones who think they need to remind people otherwise they'll lose their place in the pecking orders. Typically people who are a few steps shy of the best - silver medallists if you will - are the ones who need to spend a lot of time reminding people they are almost the best.