Get the latest tech news

What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can't?


Engineering talent is about task-capability, not speed or volume

Solving very difficult bugs (e.g. race conditions across multiple services) Delivering meaningful improvements to the thorniest parts of legacy codebases Successfully making changes that require a big architectural rework For the top-end of the strongest engineers, the capabilities become things like “improving the SOTA for large language models” and “making self-driving cars work”. Even lack of talent can be context-specific: for instance, maybe they’re an embedded-systems whiz trying out a different field and not having much success, or a big-company employee struggling to adapt to startup norms.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of strong engineers

strong engineers

Photo of weak engineers

weak engineers