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What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]

(faculty.washington.edu)
94 points azhenley | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 23:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.22s | source
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austin-cheney ◴[20 Feb 25 00:30 UTC] No.43109664[source]▶
We certainly know what makes bad developers:

* decision anxiety

* fear of writing original ideas, both natural language and code

* the inability to measure things

* preference towards bias

* cognitive conservatism

* inability to form assertion criteria

Real engineers proceed on the basis of evidence and in the absence of evidence make arbitrary original decisions as necessary to gather evidence.

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1. musicale ◴[20 Feb 25 02:58 UTC] No.43110572[source]▶
Bad management can easily incentivize all of those things, with the possible exception of neglecting assertion criteria.