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0 pointswjossey5y ago0 comments

Join companies with problems worth solving, add value as quickly as possible, and then find problems that you can tackle and start advocating to be granted the latitude to tackle them.

Most companies and teams are thrilled to have people who proactively seek to solve thorny issues. The difference with me is that most programmers are attracted to solving “problems” in a code base, which might add value but have arguable ROI. I’m rarely the person who advocates for a rewrite or tries to push some hot new technology. I’m almost always the engineer who asks the question “how can we apply what we’ve already written to this new sector” or “how do we change up this experience to cut onboarding time in half” etc.

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no_wizard5y ago

Better take, to add in to this:

My unique (well one of) internalized properties I have is having a keen eye for good problem to technology fit. Steve Jobs said it best with

“start with the experience and work backwards toward the technology”

In another words, it’s extremely valuable to be able to understand when you can re use an existing tool (in this case, existing code) to achieve the result, which is different from trying to shoehorn your existing code to fix/improve/add a feature to an existing problem space or product domain.

That’s the real key, to me, in a nutshell

(And why I almost never buy in on complete re writes)

collyw5y ago

My other knowledge is in biology, but bioinformatics seems to pay less than normal software engineering.

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