Not exactly something to encourage, but it sounds like he has experience in competitive competitions, where generating code to a problem on the fly is necessary. It's not something you can't learn yourself, but rote memorization of common problems and solutions (to the point where you can mechanically type down some algorithm from memory) is the bane of my existence
Yes it is. Putting out fires, quickly, is very important.
The problem comes later when the breathing sapce arrives to regularise the fix and replace the band-aid with good quality code.
At this point no fire is burning, the problems are not immediately visible, and it takes very good management, right up the stack, to fix that sort of problrm.
> Not exactly something to encourage
Yes. Exactly right. Because the band-aid with all its ugliness becomes the permanent fix because there is no revenue box to place the work in takes to fix it into
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Especially in my industry, we don't get too many chances to convince the product managers to "go back and actually fit the code". From a business sense, it's a great skill, but business realities equate it to the ability to plug up a dam with a cork.
"This will fix the problem for now, BUT it will make _everything_ harder in the long run unless we spend time to do it properly".
Then when they complain about stuff taking longer than it should I can just refer to the ticket/email/meeting memo and remind them that I did say so.
In my experience production fires are rarely put out by rote algorithmic knowledge, the skill is more having a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every layer of the system so that you can come to the right conclusion based on the very limited information available in the average production monitoring system.
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>the skill is more having a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every layer of the system so that you can come to the right conclusion
Yup, and that's transferable skills from competition coding. You're not juggling algorithms in your head per se, but you juggle whatever tribal knowledge needed as options to cycle through. That combined with the above mindset can lead to such skills.