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Re:How to be a -10x Engineer by jiggawatts on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @08:13PM (#35447534)
> Close runner up: an engineer who writes code that is inscrutable and therefore unmaintainable

The most spectacular example of this I've ever seen was a developer writing Java that only ever used single-character identifiers.

As in the following style:

    class D {
        public A foo(B b, C c ) {
            D d = b.x( c );
            return new A(d.f(1));
        }
    }

Now imagine this for several hundred thousand lines. Zero comments. Massive functions.

You might be wondering: what happens when he gets to "z" and runs out of identifiers? No problem! He just kept going thus: aa, ab, ac, ad, etc... I saw code up to "dh" or somesuch.

He had perfect job security... right up until the startup he was working for imploded because nobody could collaborate on that code.

Re:How to be a -10x Engineer by xnx on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @10:20PM (#35448481)
Wow. He probably thought this was making the code more compact/efficient/faster.
Re:How to be a -10x Engineer by edandersen on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @11:00PM (#35448754)
No, it was job security. This happens all the time when incentives are not aligned. Some engineers even have private dictionaries to convert between the obfuscated code and the real definitions.
Re:How to be a -10x Engineer by pmoriarty on Wednesday April 05, 2023 @08:36AM (#35453068)
This looks like typical variable naming in Haskell. That community just loves one-letter variable names... I'll never understand why.