[grepthisab]

> What they don't see is that the engineer tossing the ball figured out that the solution they were about to spend 2 weeks coding can be achieved by leveraging an existing library requiring only a couple days effort.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but that wouldn't mean that the engineer shouldn't implement in a couple days and then work on something else. HN loves the trope of the super smart engineer who is smarter than _everyone_ and can look like they're doing nothing.

[NoodleIncident]

You don't have to be a "super smart engineer" for that situation to occur. It's completely normal for software features to shrink (or grow) by that much time in my experience.

[logicchains]

The engineer probably isn't going to get paid any more for finishing it faster, so what incentive do they have?