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In praise of “normal” engineers
This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engi…
Most of us have encountered a few engineers who seem practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to non-obvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high quality code at unreal velocity. It may be based on flimsy, shoddy research, and the claims people have made to defend it have often been risible (e.g. “10x engineers have dark backgrounds, are rarely seen doing UI work, are poor mentors and interviewers”), or blatantly double down on stereotypes (“we look for young dudes in hoodies that remind us of Mark Zuckerberg”). Are you working on microprocessors, IoT, database internals, web services, user experience, mobile apps, consulting, embedded systems, cryptography, animation, training models for gen AI… what?
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