| I think you're suffering from a lack of imagination. > 99% of use-cases for businesses are for the most part "solved." History is over, technology is done advancing, every business idea has already been had and executed well, everything that can be done has already been done. Sure. And you would have said the exact same thing last year, and 10 years ago, and 50 years ago, and 400 years ago, and you would have been monumentally wrong each time. But June 29, 2023 is different. This is the first day of the end of history. By the way, the quotes around your word "solved" stand for many things, including paying through the nose for ineffective B.S. jobs that only exist due to inertia. > do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can feel smart? The Curiosity Rover's wheels, which were re-invented for that purpose, are getting holes in them because the kind of rocks they expected to find are slightly different. Perseverance had its wheels re-invented again to fix this. Someone should have told those so-called rocket scientists at NASA that they're only trying to make themselves feel smart! If we never re-invented the wheel, we'd all be driving around on carved stone. "But you're not NASA, loser!" you say. Why not? Why aren't you doing something new too? > the talent alone is the difference between millions of dollars This is still true. One single talented coder can be the difference between a multi-million dollar business succeeding or failing. I have no idea why you think this is not true anymore; my guess is that you're completely unable to recognize these people when you're around them. Don't worry, most people can't recognize them. In before: "wow, you really think you're an underappreciated rockstar, huh?" -- potentially. Of course I can't prove it over the internet. But rockstars are as much of the product of the environment you put them in as they are their own brains. Maybe rockstars actually are more common than you realize -- maybe you're the reason they're not rocking out. > If you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged with another really talented coder, you do not have a "rockstar." Or maybe the shackles and chains you're putting around these talented coders are forcing them into the same sub-optimal modes where they can't shine. I suspect if you really fostered an environment where software engineers could grow, learn, and shine -- where you fucking TRUST them, in other words -- you'd find they're not so replaceable as you think. > I don't need to work with any more software engineers who think it's okay to be a massive dick to everyone It's never okay to be a massive dick to everyone. In my experience, dickishness is negatively correlated with skill and talent, not positively. This is not an argument against highly talented programmers. |