[badc0ffee]

> Even if you hire a cracked engineer, it’s probably not gonna be a good experience all-around if you can’t make a human connection.

"Cracked engineer" is throwing me, but maybe I've just never seen the word cracked used this way before. Should it be "crack", like "crack team"?

[Avicebron]

It's a fairly common english phrase that originated out of the gaming culture of the US in the mid 2000-2010s.

"He's so good (plays aggressively) he must be on crack" sort of became "he's cracked", etc. Now that the people who were killing CoD lobbies are writing code full time or running companies, its seeped out.

Actually I think "it's cooked" came from this as well.

[stuxnet79]

I have heard this term and used it myself but wasn't aware of the etymology.

Funny enough, I've only ever heard 'crack team' used in a professional context.

If 'cooked' diffuses to corporate at the same rate then I'm very much looking forward to 'cooking the ops' during standup in 2035 :P

[kbelder]

"Crack team" long predates video games and even crack cocaine. I think it is related to the phrase "get cracking", i.e., "get working", but I wasn't able to find a clear etymological line. One possibility is it refers to gunfire, but I wonder if it refers to harvesting, cracking corn, etc.

[mrguyorama]

Oxford claims "Crack Shot" to refer to an expert marksman goes all the way back to 1841.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/crack-shot_n?tl=true

[defrost]

What if it's actually Craic team though ?

IMHE everybody wants to be on the craic team - they play hard, work hard and go hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craic

[jszymborski]

Notably, if someone is "cooked", it's bad. If someone is "cooking", it's often (but not necessarily) positive, most commonly in the form "let him/her cook" or "he's/she's cooking".

[Izkata]

I have no idea where "cooked" came from, but "cooking" seems to be from the very old phrase "cooking up" which broadly meant something like "creatively making" and didn't specifically refer to food.

[dugidugout]

I believe it was emergent from FPS gaming culture, particularly following the popularity of Apex Legends. In Apex Legends you have an energy shield which serves as a buffer of hit points. When playing cooperatively it is useful to communicate when this energy shield is "cracked", thus the line "they are cracked" emerged. This originally meant a target player's shield is down in Apex Legend specifically, but it was then the Fortnite (and broader FPS) community which took this phrase and warped it to mean someone is precise or an excellent shot. Today it is certainly used in the context the original poster intended.

edit: Looking again, this may be overstated. Apex-era gaming culture likely helped popularize the usage, but considering older idioms like "crack shot," the actual etymological root is more likely there.

[pibaker]

I have never seen it used in this way before around 2021, but it has become popular since then among the Twitter and YouTube tech influencer circle. Maybe that's where OP picked it up.

[Ogre]

I'm with you, came here to ask this too. This is how I would have read it:

"Crack engineer" someone who is an excellent engineer, I feel like this goes back to at least the early 20th century, certainly long before gaming culture.

"Cracked engineer" a damaged person who is an engineer

Shrug. Language changes all the time!

[sliechty]

same, i've heard "crack engineer/team/etc" but cracked sounds to me like u fucked em mate