On Secretly Terrible Engineers

Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers by logicallee on Sunday March 08, 2015 @03:46PM (#9166916)

wait, wait, wait. In your first two paragraphs, by "software engineer" do you specifically mean a coder, a programmer, someone who is paid basically to write lines of code? (As opposed to: software tester, architect or manager-type role on technologies they might not know personally, front-end designer who happens to accidentally be able to do some javascript etc.) You mean someone with nobody below them, who is not doing software testing, debugging, front-end design, or the like, but paid to put out code, but cannot write a for loop that does a character count in the specific language they are paid to code in? And who is gainfully employed "coding" in that language, for months, years?

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Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers by patio11 on Sunday March 08, 2015 @03:55PM (#9166962)

I know, you think I'm insane, right? I doubted my sanity, too. Not a software tester, nor an architect, nor a manager, nor a houseplant, nor a figment of my imagination. A software engineer.

Actually, come to think of it, I think it's almost exactly accurate that "He had the same seniority in the same role that I would be have today if I had not quit that company 4 years ago." (This incident would have been from 5 or 6 years ago.)

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Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers by logicallee on Sunday March 08, 2015 @07:46PM (#9167919)

Okay then. So, you were explicitly told:

>that Z should be allowed to "continue to devote his full attention to work which he is well-suited for."

So what was this work? What did the person saying this have in mind?

(I cannot possibly imagine anyone saying that with a straight face, if they meant that he is totally incompetent but is the boss's son-in-law. If your quote/paraphrase is anything near accurate, the person must have genuinely thought that z was making an excellent, albeit different type of contribution. He took time out of his day to tell you that. What could he have been 'well-suited for'?)

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