Re:What distinguishes great software engineers? (2019) [pdf]
by tacitusarc on Monday November 16, 2020 @10:10PM
(#25119898)
After a few years focused on those areas, with a solid understanding of computers and software as a foundation, it may even be possible for many engineers. The issue is the tech landscape shifts so quickly that you probably won't be using that exact stack in just a couple years. Swap jenkins with gitlab ci, docker with podman, c++ with golang. Functionality is still pretty close, but implementation details are different. And the road to mastering them is reset.
Let's say a software engineer writes a C++ application that stores documents in an inverted index and he also takes care that the program is stored in a docker container and deployed to Elastic Kubernetes Service via Jenkins. Good luck understanding your IDE, C++, Tries/Radix trees, docker, Jenkins and EKS "all the way down to the metal".
It may be possible for a small subset of those but if the expectation for great engineers really is to deeply understand "all that they touch", I wonder how many can keep up with this standard.