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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

I'm mildly offended by the casual use of the word "wizard" here - I don't believe that they actually exist.

I'm not American, but I tend to think that assuming the existence of wizards or geniuses is fundamentally Unamerican.

If anything, the concept of wizard etc. is pretty much in the eyes of the beholder. In this sense, we're digging ourselves deeper by needlessly magnifying and exaggerating one's "ability". Different people produce different outcomes, but the difference in their output is mostly accidental.

Humans are not comfortable with explaining everything as luck. But I think many things are actually explained by luck, and we should take it easy.

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Vast, persistent differences in competence across programmers are definitely real. Working in a homogeneous team for a long time can obscure it, sure. But if you can't think of any colleagues drastically better than you are, then either your work is on par with the giants of our field, or it's time to find some different colleagues who can challenge you and help you to continue growing. (Or you're making a conscious decision to rest, which is fine, but not while denying the possibility of alternatives).

I don't think absence of mistakes is what makes these people great, though, more like the difficulty of the problems they're able to solve, the effectiveness with which they can manipulate and discuss ideas, and the fitness-for-purpose of their solutions.

I don't love the wizard metaphor either. Mainly because I don't like buying into the ego behind it. Kent Beck had a great talk (happiness at work, I believe) where he talked about the downsides of seeking ego validation through one's work.

I'd much rather treat these as pretty common sense, learnable lessons that are accessible to anyone.

As for one's output being mostly based on luck? I must disagree with you. I find those that care about what they're doing, and why they're doing it - consistently outperform those that aren't invested in what they're doing. And I think there are those that are more suited to our line of work than others (whether due to how their minds work, or otherwise).

Luck does however play a part in the chances we get to learn and to prove ourselves, especially if you're not born into a relative position of advantage. But to sum up one's contributions, skills, talents and effort to be just luck? That seems dismissive.

(Author here again) I appreciate your point here! It's true that "wizard" reminds me a little bit of being called a "rockstar," which I have always had a distaste for due to the above-mentioned ego thing. I elected to use "wizard" because I find it to be a useful and interesting metaphor in light of my own personal love for RPGs and fantasy, and because I was really inspired by Julia Evans' use of the term to de-mystify learning. I think of it as a rhetorical device, and nothing more.

Good to hear. That's essentially how I read the article, and I think it has a special quality to those with the rpg/ fantasy background.

I really love Julia Evan's writing as well, especially the way she's so humble and open about her path.

I have unfortunately met a bunch of folks that while being brilliant, also seem caught up in being seen as uniquely gifted/powerful. When their status gets challenged, they can be particularly nasty in defending themselves. And it's that connotation where the Wizard metaphor troubles me. Looking back I've even see myself getting caught up in this, which I think can be an energetic trap, and really harm relations and even team efficiency.

Funny that a single word has such a dichotomy :) Thanks for the article!

Ah yes, the power-mad dark wizard. You should avoid that guy and hang out with the laid back hippy zen wizards.

> Luck does however play a part in the chances we get to learn and to prove ourselves, especially if you're not born into a relative position of advantage. But to sum up one's contributions, skills, talents and effort to be just luck? That seems dismissive.

Of course I actually don't believe that everything is just luck. But too much emphasis on one's talent and ability and "good taste" and/or "right choice" etc. is actually intimidating and harmful. (Again, the balance is the key.)

Note to self: the word I should've used was "mysticism".

> Different people produce different outcomes, but the difference in their output is mostly accidental.

I prefer to work with people that accidentally consistently produce better outcomes.

> I'm mildly offended by the casual use of the word "wizard" here - I don't believe that they actually exist.

Neither do unicorns or nasal demons. It's a colloquialism and you're taking it too literally. Then there's Clarke's First Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

> Different people produce different outcomes, but the difference in their output is mostly accidental.

This is completely and obviously untrue. Do you believe a tightrope walker just gets lucky all the time, or that any ordinary person could do the job just the same?

> Humans are not comfortable with explaining everything as luck. But I think many things are actually explained by luck, and we should take it easy.

Actually, a lot of unsuccessful people are perfectly comfortable explaining everything away with "luck". That's how they stay unsuccessful.

Programming isn't about "luck", it is about skill. You don't get a working program "by chance". Sure, you might land that job because you're lucky. You're lucky to live in a time and place that offers you modern computers. You're lucky to have a brain that affords you to learn this skill - but you don't become a programmer just by accident.

I think this is just the opposite extreme. I've literally seen people copy and paste code that they didn't fully understand and it ended up working. In fact, one of the senior devs where I work added a piece of code with the specific comment "I have no idea how this works and I don't care" and its been used ever since. And he's not a bad programmer by any means having written probably 90% of the software we use by himself.

Would you say there isn't some element of luck to that?

Granted I don't think it's a dominating factor, but I do think that it is present.

Of course there's an "element of luck" to everything, just like there's a level of variance to everything, but the dominating factor is skill.

Even if all you do is copy-paste code by trial and error, there's a level of skill to that too.

The author is using wizards as synonymous with geniuses plus some geeky RPG terms used as metaphors. She's not implying that wizards exist, rather, that her peers seemed to be performing magic compared to her skill level at the time.

It's a hyperbole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

> I’ve spent the last three years learning to think like a wizard, to conjure joy from pain[1] and cast protection spells over the important things[2]. I finally feel like I’ve grown into a bonafide wizard myself.

Sounds like they're being quite earnest about the wizard stuff. Clicking through the links yields even more wizard talk.

[1] https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/06/01/conjure-joy-from-pa...

[2] https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/11/07/wizard-consultant-s...

If you follow the link at the top of the second post, you can find this, which defines what they think a 'wizard' is.

https://drawings.jvns.ca/wizard-programmer/

Hah, I remember seeing this when it first came out. Thanks for the reminder. It's not the only reference to Julia Evans on the site either.

I remember using the arrow keys in the terminal to navigate my history and edit commands. The first time I sat next to somebody who knew ^R, ^A, ^E, alt-f and more readline shortcuts, I felt they were a wizard.

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