[throwaway4233]

When I was junior/mid level engineer working in a 5-8 person engineering team, there was this particular senior engineer whom I disdained. It had nothing to do with them as a person, but I always had the feeling that they just did things at work without caring for the impact of it. The team and company grew in size over a period of 2 years and I went through a lot of first hand experiences of having to deal with unrealistic deadlines, chaotic lines of communication and multiple nights of tailing production logs to fix bugs. It was around this time, that the senior engineer during a company even got drunk and talked to me about their first few jobs.I realized that what they described, was quite similar to what I was facing right now and I came to understand why they cared so little about work they do on a daily basis.It honestly scared me at to think that I might either end up like this person or worse or burning out and quitting the field.

Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person.

The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.

[roenxi]

To anyone in a similar situation; you might want to spend some time reflecting on the reality of your role - one of the failure modes of incompetence is using "care" as a proxy for "ability" because an incompetent person almost by definition can't assess ability directly. I fell for that once and consider myself lucky that I figured out what I was doing wrong while still a fresh-faced graduate.

The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.

[crispyambulance]

   The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work.

As much as some may profess to actually believe that it simply isn’t even close to true.

I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love.

One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying.

The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.

[roenxi]

Maybe. But if someone is a junior employee they aren't going to be able to identify all the specific tells for that. I know a passionate engineer who's meeting presence can often be mistaken for someone that is half asleep. He doesn't have a lot of respect for meetings and doesn't engage much. Would a junior engineer in that meeting identify that his dozey lids, slack jaw and mastery of simple programming conceal a burning passion for the art of great software? I'd bet not. You need to be quite good at programming to properly assess what is going on.

[bruce343434]

I disagree that blindly executing like a robot is excellent. A truly excellent product happens when people go above and beyond, and think of the little yet related things, instead of doing everything literally and exactly as told and not giving a shit about the end result.

[brailsafe]

> I am in no way the same as that other person.

How do you know, and for better or worse?

Sounds like he might have been acting on wisdom, and at the time you might have perceived him through a lense of naivete, which still holds. I felt similarly in my early twenties in perhaps a similar environment, but now I know all the seniors I'd have resented were decades ahead of me in terms of what they valued and why. Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.

[throwaway4233]

> How do you know, and for better or worse?

Their decisions made the life of those around them miserable because they did not care about the consequences of it. Like for example, hiring an intern who had basic programming skills when there was no engineering bandwidth available to support the intern, and then bouncing them around multiple large projects every week, for the sake of showing upper management that they had people "working" on priority tickets. There is more to this story, but it's just more details painting that person in a bad light.

I, most certainly am not such a person.

> Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.

I agree. It's a work in progress for me to get to that state.