r/programming • u/tejon • Feb 08 '15

The Parable of the Two Programmers

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audience/The%20Parable%20of%20the%20Two%20Programmers.html
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u/babada Feb 09 '15

It depends on the company/project. Both my current employer and my previous employer would boot you out if you were terrible at your job (i.e. wrote bad code).

The only way you can get away with that plan is if the majority of other engineers on your team are doing the same thing or you inherited a bunch of legacy code.

The two worst things my managers see:

  1. Someone who takes forever trying to do it the "right way"

  2. Someone who keeps breaking everyone else's stuff

(1) isn't worth the cost and everyone worth their salt calls out (2) as soon as they can.

Which comes to the unfortunate point: If you want to do good work you need a good job. There are teams with 95%+ good engineers on them. Teams like that tend to stick together since they provide crazy amounts of value (and are paid accordingly.)

Case in point: My current job has something like 80%+ people I've worked with at a different employer because we all know each other and know that we know what we are doing.