From: David Masover Date: 2009-10-02T03:23:28+09:00 Subject: Re: Exceptional Rails Developer On Wednesday 30 September 2009 08:21:31 pm Greg Donald wrote: > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:32 PM, David Masover wrote: > > On Wednesday 30 September 2009 06:54:16 pm Greg Donald wrote: > > I mean, it is nice to occasionally be the smartest person in the room -- > > or at least the most knowledgeable. > > I hope to never find myself in that situation. Surrounding one's self > with subordinates is inconducive to learning. Not subordinates -- in this case, it's a classroom. And it means I have an opportunity to not only be lazy, and breeze through the assignments -- an entire two hours of class time today was allocated towards working on assignments I've had finished for days -- but I also have an opportunity to teach. I really do enjoy teaching, and it's also a good way to really know something. > I have observed time and again the easiest path to never be the > "maintenance" coder is to always be the fastest coder. Except, I'm not always particularly fast. I think of myself as slower, but more correct. Even so... > Smart managers > always place the faster coders out in front doing the quick > prototyping of the new projects. Except that if they also note that I'm intelligent, and that I write clean, readable, reliable code, that means I might also the best person to dig into whatever nightmarish mess needs to be cleaned up. Certainly, I'm better qualified than whoever created the mess in the first place. I suppose it comes down to what kind of a team you've actually got. But I think we're in agreement -- I'd much rather work in a place where everyone's smarter than me, so there are fewer and less-horrifying messes to clean up.