The article is a real gem. One part I particularly like:
>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.
Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything, especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]
As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in, but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.
It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended up condescending him.[3]
[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.
[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular way!"
That's kind of terrifying. Whenever my work takes me away (or largely away) from writing code for a few months, I worry that if I'm back on the job market... Not only is my code a bit rusty, but my list of JS frameworks has fallen behind too.
>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.
Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything, especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]
As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in, but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.
It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended up condescending him.[3]
[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular way!"