The best programmers I know

>Don’t Be Afraid To Get Your Hands Dirty..code is just code

All the other topics bring great wisdom, but 'go touch the code' is no longer the responsible thing for senior devs. Junior devs working on minor things, sure. However, senior devs should be rigorously following a process to 'getting their hands dirty'. When senior devs are tinkering with business critical or life critical code, they are usually unaware that the weight of responsibility of everything the software does is now theirs. That's why process exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_safety#Process_adhere...

I think you might be misreading "don't be afraid to get your hands dirty" as "go poking at stuff for trivial reasons without following any proper process" instead of "don't offload parts of your job to other people out of fear".

I imagine that, if an engineer at Pacemaker Incorporated is given a task that's touching an area they're not comfortable working on, the author would suggest that "sorry, talk to Alice" is not a good attitude while "okay, but I'll need to go through some training, do you mind if I reach out to Alice for mentorship?" is.

It's ambiguous to the point where 'just get to work' can be seen as the action that the effective senior devs do:

They are not afraid to touch it.

They never say “that’s not for me”

Instead, they just start and learn.