What is “good taste” in software engineering?

I was nodding along to this. It mostly feels like truisms.

The point about varying levels of skill vs taste is accurate in my experience.

I think I fall into the more taste than skill camp, although neither are particularly large in an absolute sense.

I switched to product management quite early in my career and pivoted to learning design and product “taste” more than software engineering.

I feel like the last point "development speed" is dependent on all previous points.

When I do a new project I always try to focus on a tech stack where - if i need to replace a part - i could easily do so. All these components are part of the decision

> One interesting consequence of this is that engineers with bad taste are like broken compasses. If you’re in the right spot, a broken compass will still point north. It’s only when you start moving around that the broken compass will steer you wrong. Likewise, many engineers with bad taste can be quite effective in the particular niche where their preferences line up with what the project needs.

This paragraph really gets to the idea of why I think discussing someone’s taste is basically useless in an engineering context. This “predictably broken compass” person stands out like a sore thumb, and you can just hold a 20min behavioural interview to filter them out.

A far more dangerous engineer is the “partially broken compass”, which appears at first sight to be working because it spins around like you’d expect, but is actually 127degrees off at all times.

Tabs instead of spaces.

Good taste is writing code that looks so simple, everyone else says "pshaw, anyone could have written that!"