I like to rate engineers across various categories, but really I found that there were two general …
I like to rate engineers across various categories, but really I found that there were two general classes of great engineers: fast and slow. For marketing tests, etc., the whole team would be fast engineers. For payments, the whole team would be slow. Everything else I would try to have tension -- a mix of the two so they learn and appreciate each other. This is condensing a multidimensional vector into just a line, but effective enough to explain to non-engineers. If you are a precision (slow) engineer, then you are more likely on the backend, more likely to write tests, more likely to avoid costly errors. This will be wasted on some kinds of tasks (trying out new things, for example, but as a class these tasks can generate a lot of management interest). The only kind of management interest in the precision stuff is failure, and it is usually doomsday failure. That said, security is always present, and I am noodling ideas right now on how to eliminate whole classes of security and privacy issues while making it even easier faster for all engineer types.
Original discussionOne common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers119 source comments · at import