> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset?

Interesting read, but I feel like the author could've spent just one more minute on this sentence. How good you are at given activity often doesn't matter, because you're mostly going to encounter people around your own level. What I'm saying is, unless you're at the absolute top or the absolute bottom, you're going to have similar ratio of wins to loses regardless whether you're a pro or an amateur, simply because an amateur gets paired with other amateurs, while a pro gets paired with other pros. In other words, not being the worst is often everything you need, and being the best is pretty much unreachable anyway.

This can be very well extended to our discussion about SWEs. As long as you're not the worst nor the best, your skill and dedication have little correlation with your salary, job satisfaction, etc. Therefore, if you know you can't become the best, doing bare minimum not to get fired is a very sensible strategy, because beyond that point, the law of diminishing returns hits hard. This is especially important when you realize that usually in order to improve on anything (like programming), you need to use up resources that you could use for something else. In other words, every 15 minutes spent improving is 15 minutes not spent browsing TikTok, with the latter being obviously a preferable activity.

Wait, but I'm on ProgrammerTok to improve my skills while I'm waiting for my code to compile!

Competitive games are complex. It's hard to be 95% percentile. There are so many mistakes one can make, even if each individual mistake is unlikely, it's likely that a mistake will be made. I participate in Dota 2, and literally everyone makes noticeable mistakes, even including tier 1 pro players and the top ranked pub players. I honestly find it amazing how good people are given how complex the domain is.

Now scale that up 10x, because reality is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a video game.

>Just for example, if you're a local table tennis hotshot who can beat every rando at a local bar, when you challenge someone to a game and they say "sure, what's your rating?" you know you're in for a shellacking by someone who can probably beat you while playing with a shoe brush (an actual feat that happened to a friend of mine, BTW). You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return as well as be able to kill any shot a local bar expert is able to consitently hit.

And it's very easy to forget when you're the guy going to the club just how bad most regular players are.

I'm in a table tennis club, my rating is solidly middle of the pack, and so I see myself as an average player. But the author is correct, I would destroy any casual player. I almost never play casual players, though.

Not sure how applicable this is to software engineering.