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Comment by ameminator | Hacker News Reader

>It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable.

I wish this were the case, but I don't think it's true. On the one hand, real, proven experts do get called in to fix these phonies' messes. On the other, often these people succeed often enough that it devalues our labor as a whole. Finally, if employers cannot determine real experts from fake, then it means they won't pay real experts their full worth (eg 'full worth' of 100k, 5% chance it's a fake = pay of 95k).

These costs of lower trust show up elsewhere, but they are hard to quantify and make everyone's life worse.

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You bring up a good point...the overall pull downward that the phonies bring to our field. Businesses trust (software) engineering teams less. Perhaps overall industry pay rates are brought down, too, though I don't have personal experience or knowledge about that.

However, that point you make about the 'proven experts' getting called in is where my original (and perhaps overly broad) comment came from. If you can align yourself with the industry as one of those fixers, and then actually deliver on that promise, there is immense value to capture. If you can carefully build a small team of people that can do this regularly, there is even more value to capture and share with people who actually deserve it.

If they succeed then aren't they an acceptable fit for the role? If it devalues the role then that means the job isn't as demanding as the title makes it seem.

The definition of 'success' varies. If you mean 'completed the project on time with decent quality' -> then no, that doesn't happen as often as with tried and true experts.

When I said 'success' I meant: 'achieved a basic level of competency after bungling one or several projects, often with unknown or unquantifiable bugs and then move onto the next company / role with few consequences'.

More succinctly: caused harm to others/ project and still got a paycheck.

Yeah that would be great is success meant "sound engineering that meets the requirements and is delivered on time without generating friction with stakeholders or adding unneeded complexity". Unfortunately on some companies that don't actually ship much of what gets engineered success means "we got to the next financing round" or "our skills got noted by upper management so we are still allowed to hang around". Bad engineers survive in the last two environments and at the same time stockpile credentials about how many years they were senior at Google or Lyft or whatever, but they really can't actually engineer anything most of the time.

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