What Is a Wildcard Person?

Wildcard burnout will be the next article

That isn't true, most developers prefers not to be pressured while some people just can't motivate themselves without the thrill.

Honestly, will these people ever stop huffing their own farts? This site is so full of itself sometimes. Are all of you guys really THAT engineer to the degree that you act like it on this site?

Are we really going to celebrate a new marketing term to sell the idea of knowing more than one thing back to engineers?

Like, hey, what if, hey maybe what if it was a good idea for people to know more than just the very narrow domain that we slot them into. Like, they could read books and things, and, have different competencies, and not necessarily approach every problem from the perspective of the STEMMIEST GOONIEST engineer ever. Maybe they could look at the same problem from different perspectives, instead of just steamrolling over all the others in a mad race to be the most engineeringest engineer that ever engineered, the kid that was building radios in his garage, getting stomped on by the kid that was writing linux kernel modules in diapers or some shit, all of us clambering over eachother to engineer harder. And when something goes wrong, the problem was you didn't engineer hard enough-- don't worry, there are ten or twenty brilliant engineers here who will be able to point out your engineering mistakes.

Maybe we should try to understand how we have accepted and profited from a society that increasingly only wants you to know how to do one thing, and that thing is engineering. Maybe even of the amazingly talented engineers on this site-- and I know there are truly many-- it is true that though engineering is what society will currently pay them for, it is not what society needs most of them. Maybe in fact it is paying them mostly to keep their heads down and not think, to work on smart fridges and disposable scooters and giant vacuums that suck up all your data and package it into a CDO. Maybe we all need to read a fucking book once in a while, and maybe that means we need to pay people to write the books so that we have something to read. Here's a shocking idea, maybe some of those writers have multiple competencies too, maybe some of them would actually make amazing engineers-- but actually society needs them to write more than it needs them to engineer. It needs to pay them to write. It needs to pay shitty writers long enough for them to get good as much as it needs to pay shitty engineers. That's what it means for something to be a real profession and not a hobby for dipshits, it means society agrees to pay you without you having to beg. Maybe we don't need comments, maybe we need fucking books. Maybe we don't need headlines, maybe we need stories. And everyone always has a take. Everyone always has a fucking take. Go shove your take. We're living in a fucking take machine here.

Maybe without all this shit, we are plowing forward into a future we don't understand-- towards goals we didn't choose-- because we get paid and hey, we're good at it. We're good engineers. We make thing work. We make thing go fast.

You wanna build something, you wildcard piece of shit, build a way to pay other jobs what they're worth instead of finding new ways to overpay engineers to build fucking Skynet / The Matrix / The Metaverse.

>they need to be complemented by at least one type A, no-nonsense delivery manager

And these managers need to report to them, not the other way around.

Truly great things either way, but an order of magnitude more accomplishments which is noticeable.

Kind of like a real rock star who is the one that hires the manager, even though the manager will be the one outlining and scheduling the grueling tasks for the performer, which the performer will adhere to as if the manager was his actual boss, except with none of the disadvantages.

Yes, the idea and the debate is as old as history. I prefer the quote from Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects." Because actually, if you look at well run organizations, everybody needs to be a generalist to some degree. You don't just work in a silo and ignore every other aspect of what your organization does, otherwise you produce deficient solutions that your colleagues in their own siloes need to work around. Eventually the only people that can thrive in such an organization are the generalists because everything fits together so poorly only the people willing to tackle novel things can solve any problem. People talk about force multipliers because you need to be generally aware of what a lot of different people are doing and help them align to be as productive as possible.

> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

He was a bit pro-military for my tastes, but I hope you get the idea. You'll make more money stepping up than drilling down. Of course, context and opportunity matters a lot. Success isn't dictated (possibly barely affected, given the debate) by this single dimension.