Understanding Your Code Isn't Optional

The "10x engineer" trope is a load of crap. It's marketing speak for people who think typing speed is the same thing as engineering. Most of these "10x" people are just cranks who write bugs ten times faster than everyone else and then leave the mess for others to clean up.

If you're obsessed with "velocity" and "sprints," you're probably not doing real work. You're just generating noise.

Stop Copy-Pasting Garbage

If you have a bug and your first instinct is to copy-paste a solution from StackOverflow or an LLM without understanding exactly what it does, you're not a developer. You're a parrot.

It doesn't matter if it "works" for now. If you don't know why it works, you haven't solved anything. You've just added a layer of digital duct tape that someone else will have to peel off in three months when it inevitably breaks. Modern infrastructure is full of this kind of laziness, and it's why everything is so fragile.

Read the Damn Manual

Lately, I've seen people acting like reading documentation is some kind of heroic sacrifice. It's not. It's a basic requirement of the job.

If you're frustrated that you spent four hours reading kernel documentation just to change one line of config, then you're in the wrong business. That "lost" time is actually the only time you were doing something valuable. Now you actually understand the system. You own that knowledge. You're not just renting it.

Comprehension is the Only Metric

We have all these useless charts—velocity, burndown, whatever. They're all distractions.

The only metric that matters is Comprehension.

If the internet went down tomorrow and you couldn't explain how your authentication flow actually works at a low level, you aren't an engineer. You're just falling forward and hoping you don't hit the ground too hard.

The Bottom Line

I'm not saying you should spend your life contemplating every if statement. But stop pretending that "shipping fast" is an excuse for being incompetent.

Read the source code. Understand the libraries you use. If you don't have time to do it right, you definitely don't have time to do it twice.

The world won't end if you ship on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. But it might actually be better software if you do.