> However others are only fluent and comfortable in that one legacy technology and are not really experienced in the fundamentals. A surprising number of those people exist. That’s who we want to avoid.
'The Prince' has a whole chapter about wheter employing mercenary soldiers can be considered a good thing. And he gets into the conclusion that mercenaries must be the last kind of resource you want to employ in an army, and that is better to avoid them.
To stitch this with what we are talking about here, in my experience, people that get stuck in a given technology are more conservative types, who do just enough to fit in a given position, and make it as solid as possible, so to garantee their paychecks by the end of the month, and to be perceived as a perfect fit for that position, and consolidate the job for years to come. Its on-pair with mercenary because, theres no cause or love for the tecnology, for what we can achieve with it, but those values get corrupted when they clash with a solid and continuous source of income.
More inovative people are more bold, and take more risks, but a lot of companies wont like them, and they wont be perceived as a good fit for the company (in their speech of course they do, but not in real life).
I guess the first, is more of the profile you are saying you are trying to avoid. And i think thats good, because this profile tend to have a more parasitic relationship with the company. If your company moves faster, maybe they wont make a good fit in that sort of environment.
Also its good to avoid people that have a tendency to game things. There a lot of people in this world, that dont care much about anything else and just do enough to understand the game of a given system and score enough to win in that sort of game consolidating its own position. (For instance, that puzzle based hiring interview iss being gamed right now, and companies are not hiring what they think they do right now.. humans will adapt to the games til they mean nothing anymore)
A good fit for a Astronaut for instance, is that kid that was dreaming about the space, and will do everything to make this dream come true. When theres a real problem, or something that requires real passion to be done, that 'kid' will make the difference.
Nothing can work as a suplementary replacement for real passion.
(From someone that has real passion, and cant understand how people can live without it)
> "good to avoid people that have a tendency to game things"
Sorry, but most employers essentially "game things": they extract as much value as they can out of you in return for the smallest amount of compensation they can get away with giving you. Yet I don't see you being critical of managers and CEOs, just other engineers. Managers love it when engineers getting into pissing matches about "passion", hackathons, which stack is most l33t, etc. (Erik Dietrich's term "carnival cash" comes to mind.) Meanwhile that business major 10 years your junior with a PMP certificate they got online -- and who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag -- just got promoted to senior project manager and gets to tell you what to do.
By 40, to put it in high-level abstract terms, the most important thing is figuring out what you need to be doing so you're earning the compensation you want/need and living the lifestyle you actually want to live. The "game" that other engineers around us in the marketplace are playing, so to speak, is the one having to do with optimizing compensation and quality of life. I can choose to walk onto the court and play a different game -- one with rules I personally feel are more noble, or something -- but that won't change the external reality around me, and nobody will care, except employers looking to take advantage of engineers willing to prioritize "passion" over things like "compensation" or "spending time with my kids" or "adequate health insurance".
A scrub is not just a bad player. Everyone needs time to learn a game and get to a point where they know what they're doing. The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can't get over these common hangups, in a sense you've lost before you even started. You've lost before you even picked which game to play. You aren't playing to win.
A scrub would disagree with this though. They'd say they are trying very hard. The problem is they are only trying hard within a construct of fictitious rules that prevent them from ever truly competing.
You make a excelent point. People in power positions trying to take advantage of näive.
The recipe here, is that you create a untrue image of a "Emerald City", where everything is possible for the people that work hard, show them the great Wizard of Oz as a example of what you can acomplish, and wait the dreamers like Dorothy to pile over in order to fulfill their dreams. You will have hard-working, starry-eyed workers accepting almost anything.
Sure, the Big Corp™ also use a gaming system to its own advantage, making a feist from the naive.
It's ok to be skeptic when in your environment they actually swallow the dreamer type. We always need to be smart, detect what's really going on and adapt to the environment.
Sometimes you just wasnt lucky to find a good fit for you. But whatever happened its good to survive not only the outside world, but to fight for your inner fire. The thing that will make you move on with a sense of purpose. But of course you shouldnt let people take advantage of that, and a lot of people will actually try, not only professionally.
'The Prince' has a whole chapter about wheter employing mercenary soldiers can be considered a good thing. And he gets into the conclusion that mercenaries must be the last kind of resource you want to employ in an army, and that is better to avoid them.
To stitch this with what we are talking about here, in my experience, people that get stuck in a given technology are more conservative types, who do just enough to fit in a given position, and make it as solid as possible, so to garantee their paychecks by the end of the month, and to be perceived as a perfect fit for that position, and consolidate the job for years to come. Its on-pair with mercenary because, theres no cause or love for the tecnology, for what we can achieve with it, but those values get corrupted when they clash with a solid and continuous source of income.
More inovative people are more bold, and take more risks, but a lot of companies wont like them, and they wont be perceived as a good fit for the company (in their speech of course they do, but not in real life).
I guess the first, is more of the profile you are saying you are trying to avoid. And i think thats good, because this profile tend to have a more parasitic relationship with the company. If your company moves faster, maybe they wont make a good fit in that sort of environment.
Also its good to avoid people that have a tendency to game things. There a lot of people in this world, that dont care much about anything else and just do enough to understand the game of a given system and score enough to win in that sort of game consolidating its own position. (For instance, that puzzle based hiring interview iss being gamed right now, and companies are not hiring what they think they do right now.. humans will adapt to the games til they mean nothing anymore)
A good fit for a Astronaut for instance, is that kid that was dreaming about the space, and will do everything to make this dream come true. When theres a real problem, or something that requires real passion to be done, that 'kid' will make the difference.
Nothing can work as a suplementary replacement for real passion.
(From someone that has real passion, and cant understand how people can live without it)