(faculty.washington.edu)

94 points azhenley | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 23:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source

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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.

1. rognjen ◴[20 Feb 25 08:40 UTC] No.43112475[source]▶

It's interesting how your list contains points that are almost duplicates of each other:

- fear of original ideas = cognitive conservatism = preference towards bias

And kind of opposites:

- decision anxiety = results from, or brings about, too much measuring

So, I guess those can be digested to say that engineers are:

- Innovative - Make informed decisions

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