It can be a drag on work quality. An engineer that dabbles in design hobbies on the side can provide valuable UX ideas that will make the whole product excellent whereas an engineer that nerds out on the latest code trend will pitch rewriting the whole product in Rust at the 11th hour as if any user gives a shit.

I’ve worked with plenty of people like you and some of them wouldn’t know a good product if it smacked them in the face. Most products don’t need more engineering capabilities, they need people involved with excellence in multiple skills.

Apple is an embodiment of this. None of their engineering is bleeding edge but they make categorically redefining products. People that nerd out over something like Linux wouldn’t get it.

I have yet to meet a software engineer who is highly competent and also suggests rewriting a working application in Rust at the 11th hour. In fact the people you are talking about are mostly juniors who read something in an article on a random webpage.

By the way you are talking, no, you have not worked with people like me. Most products are garbage because of poor planning, poor market research and bad/rushed engineering.

Tell me you don't know anything about Apple without telling me that you don't know anything about Apple. A lot of their engineering is absolutely bleeding edge. Right now I am working on improving/adding features to a real time ray tracing renderer that works at 30+ fps on the latest iPhones 14 Pro. Most people's desktop PCs cannot do real time ray tracing and yet Apple does it on a phone. But I guess that is not bleeding edge...