[bholley]

I think you're both misinterpreting the title.

The sign is near the ceiling. It's not a question of some people being taller than others. Nobody is that tall - not even dbaron (pictured in the photo), who is one of Mozilla's three Distinguished Engineers.

Carefully balancing swirling dependencies of doom doesn't make you a great programmer, at least not in the world of large-scale systems. Choosing the right design to avoid or eliminate those swirling dependencies is much more important.

[hamburglar]

That's fine, and I even agree -- perhaps nobody should venture into the swirling dependencies of doom territory with multi-threaded programming. However, my point is that this type of argument makes it seem as though nobody should attempt the more mundane, turn-the-crank, not-very-hard multi-threaded programming either, which is a bad attitude to perpetuate.