Stop Celebrating Incompetence
It seems that in today’s society, incompetence is often celebrated rather than called out and corrected. Whether it’s in the workplace, in politics, or in other areas of life, there is a disturbing trend of praising mediocrity instead of demanding excellence.
When we celebrate incompetence, we are sending the message that it’s okay to be average or even below average. This sets a dangerous precedent and can lead to a decline in standards and a lack of ambition among individuals and organizations.
It’s important to hold ourselves and others to high standards and to strive for excellence in everything we do. By recognizing and rewarding competence and hard work, we can create a culture of success and achievement.
So let’s stop celebrating incompetence and start encouraging and supporting those who are truly deserving of praise. Together, we can raise the bar and strive for excellence in all aspects of our lives.
"Do it for years then get a job" Mutha fucka some of us dont have years
DHH is hit or miss, but he takes big swings. When he hits he hits.
I'm right because I read the documentation 😅
"Waterfall does not fall from top to bottom, because technically the water evaporates and it's, like, a circle" – Primeagen The Competent, anno 2069.
Paused @1:28 to say; I hope this is about mentorship and not about "you probably shouldn't be a SWE". There are times when the latter is true, but I've yet to experience former. I always get the "you'll get it eventually" or "yeah it's magic to me too!!" (exception was this last job, I had an awesome team, and I hope to work with them more in the future)
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but… that's all i am. all i ever will be. at anything. i am incompetent. i hate it but i am. im not good at anything. but i have to keep trying because there is nothing for me if i quit.
The incompetence here is thinking this is anything new. I was in the industry for 25 years. There has always been a fairly high percentage of people who just do not know what they are doing. My assumption is that this applies to every industry.
>You don't have to reduce an entire profession to a clueless gang of copy-pasta pirates to make new recruits feel welcome.
Sure. We need to reduce an entire profession to a gang of glass-cannon divas who know how to deploy to AWS but start shattering at the very notion of writing basic front-end components, writing anything to mobile, updating docs to reflect new API changes, improving old APIs, building a devops pipeline, or writing some shaders for 3D front-end.
One of the important things is the dogged determination to solve a problem. This leads to solving the problem and moving to the next step of learning.
3:10 – eh, I feel like this is also kind of a toxic mentality though. Neither statement is always correct. The problem is, most of your time at most jobs will probably be spent debugging larger systems that were written by many people who were not yourself, and even parts by yourself that you haven't touched in years and don't remember. Getting in the zone and belting out some code feels great and works well for smaller side-projects you're working on yourself. In job code though? You're going to spend most of your time "looking up" how the rest of the system works, often by just reading the code itself.
"are you even GOOD ENOUGH to have imposter syndrome?"
I just realized: a clown making a show and clapping is getting 230k views, while some cutting-edge researchers get only 8k views…
PRIME, I taught myself BASIC at 5 years old in the 80s. It was awesome.
As a gamedev, that quaternion flex hit too close to home
Nice try but I truly am a stupid and incompetent programmer that just hasn't been found out yet.
I would just be happy if people that should notvprogram without adult supervision were kept … at least under adult spupervision.
GREAT VIDEO, take it from someone who have been programming for over 25 years. Yes, http stuff is easy (which reminds me, CuRL, Rest, JSON, XML, headers, all of that is a must)
RegEx, CSS, all of those are still very relevant if that is your coding style. Learn IP stacks, JS, and not so much frameworks.
if Java, sure, if you have time, python have many uses, or if like me
C, Assembler or all things related to machine code (I do OSINT/InfoSec/OWASP) so not really SE but but I need to know various languages. I do not however recommend, Ruby, .NET and Scala (of course, if you use it, fine).
Practice, practice and practice. Learn to expand your stack, Sql, NoSql, makes no difference, the more languages you know the easier it becomes. Test your limits by even expanding to various Operating Systems, VMs, HEX… you will become in time some of the most needed devs. But AI, I am like 'are you having a laugh mate', don't waste my tye with hype. I do not care about LLMs and their frontend and their WOW 'this will replace xyz'… just stop, this 'you would not believe what this new ai can do', please stop make a fool of yourself…. 'ex-xyz employee exposes….' really, lol, is that so? Easy for me to check at any rate.
See, if you know the stuff I learned over this years you become a force that is unstoppable. One day you will say (as result of hard work) "not matter how hard you try, I will outsmart you, I will outwork you and I will outlast you'.
Let this be a reminder to those who are currently doubting themselves. STOP IT, stay humble, always learn, there will ALWAYS be someone better than you and that is a good thing. Learn to FAIL HARD, LEARN TO FAIL 1000 times if needed, nothing worth doing is easy
Its all BS. Its not a "career".
I actually relate to the spatial math by hand. I have no formal education and I started in UEFN when it came out, and there aren't external libraries or other code to copy so I have just learned how to write code through pure determination and will, with the available API and a discord community + AI to ask questions to. I solve some pretty gnarly problems and write a lot of spatial math, but it is put together of the math that i can understand. It's not the most efficient… and actually it may be some of the least efficient code that you can write, that will actually compile and do the thing it needs to, BUT its effective.
I think the idea that you can't understand something is ridiculous, you can do anything that you don't give up at. It doesn't mean that you can understand anything in a day, or a month, or some things even a year (radians 😠) , but if you just keep working on what you can learn and keep exposing yourself to what you don't understand, one day it will click.
Something I think people should do more, is stop acting like you're actually doing all of the work and give all of the autonomous systems and subconscious computing power that your brain has some credit. I think people dramatize hard work as if they have to do something besides show up, subsequently sleep, and repeat that long enough for your brain to figure it out for you. You're the captain of the ship, you set course and make sure that you're present, that's it. The sooner you start treating it like that, the sooner you will be able to overcome any obstacle with ease.