> Your performance review is solid, of course, your deliverables unimpeachable, but something begins to feel increasingly off. Your colleagues are in more meetings, but your task list only grows longer. Your progress on said project is appreciated by your boss and team, maybe even your boss' boss, but never really recognized.
Hint: think of the widespread expression used in terrorism debates: "Lone wolf". It's a self radicalized/motivated individual acting independently and alone.
Lone wolves are not happy animals, though. They are less successful in hunts, they can’t take down large prey at all. They don’t generally produce offspring. They’re an unfortunate effect of the social structure of wolves, where young males who cannot find a place in the pack are expelled.
There are plenty of lone wolf developers, but you won’t find them in large teams. Or if you do, they’re dysfunctional. On their own, a lone wolf engineer is not generally able to complete large, important pieces of work. Some do! But they are exceptions.
Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a well formed fictional archetype.
You assume "lone wolf" types are "one trick ponies" who can't learn. You also assume the only interesting problem space for these people is technical/code.
The lone wolf has a big limitations in transitioning to scale:
1. managers do what the article suggested, and stay out their way. The lone wolf never gets the experience of being managed, so it is difficult to transition to manage others.
2. they don't get why others don't "get it". e,g the solution is clear , the code can be done in a day, the comprehensive system model in their head should be shared by everyone.... it takes time to understand that the average engineer works slow and steady on a small scale understanding.
I will suggest there is a lone wolf type manager too. This is not a productivity skill, but an adaptivity and mobility skill.
you need to think in a different plane of isolation. i would say the pure machiavellian manager is a lone wolf in that the relationships hold no weight as interpersonal relationships, only as functional relationships - no different to how you would manage and integrate code.
> i have been seen wolves accomplishing amazing feats and being sidelined for not being team players by mediocre leadership because the leadership did not get recognition.
Since the Covid theater, Stoicism is everywhere: that's why I don't read about it anymore because wherever the mass and Pavlov dogs head, the truth is elsewhere.
That's kind of a narrow take; the mainstream may be directed towards a good thing and just not have the depth to draw a benefit, its attention being superficial and fleeting.
E.g. the Pavlovian dog metaphor is quite a mainstream trope, but doesn't it carry an important message nevertheless?
If anything, I would say that fleeting takes and offhand dismissals are what determines and solidifies the mainstream's superficiality.
>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each.
One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety".
More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.
I think the joke is going over my head ^^; Maybe you mean 'just' a regular developer as opposed to a cryptobro?
Edit: I see you added in a link. "The research found that more than half of the 1200 developers surveyed are unable to ensure that their code is protected from seven common vulnerabilities", hmm maybe it was not a joke? The article (or the survey it's based on) sounds extremely misguided though, sounding comparable to saying that only X% of farmers never had a single rotten apple so clearly it's not a 'top' priority for them to produce quality at all cost
Oh, and I just noticed you're the same person as whom I was responding to above. That explains
Fwiw, I do security audits as a day job so I have some idea of which coding practices lead to good security and it's not download size. You can try this "you're just a developer" again on someone else maybe
> The article (or the survey it's based on) sounds extremely misguided though
Unfortunately the entire Internet is bloated with such extremely misguided jokes. Here is another extremely misguided joke:
"We have a fundamental problem in the way we develop software. A large percentage of software is created by people who were never trained on the basics of security. " [1]
Generally the larger the codebase the harder it is to secure. I am less worried about security vulnerabilities on small tightly focused apps than I am on gigantic monstrosities with hundreds of different attack surfaces.
According to looking at a 1,000 line code file on my machine right now, a million lines is about 48mb. You think > 10 million lines of code are required for security in an app?
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
It can not be farther from the truth.
The best way to stay in the bottom is to work hard, to focus on work so that others have time to focus on advertising themselves, take credit of your good work and backstab you for everything else, befriend and lick the shoes strategically -even develop bed skills, for some- while you isolate yourself by sweating and believing everyone will understand or care about how you optimized that for loop.
Cynicism is a seductive drug. It makes you feel good because you don't have to do anything--the game is rigged, so why bother trying? But like all drugs it is ultimately self-sabotaging.
Careers are like love: you have to risk heartbreak or you'll never experience joy.
I don't think there's a one size fits all here. If you don't go out of your comfort zone and "do more" you may never get a promotion because you're seen as average. But it's also true that if you work hard and constantly deliver you may still never get the promotion because you're seen as critical where you are.
You might be disappointed either way. Like any recipe, there are many ingredients needed to pull it off. Delivering results, solving your boss' or boss' boss problems, doing it visibly, having support from above, doing it at the right time, etc. all contribute.
When you sit in a café, even when you do nothing as the author said, you are still not alone because you are visually (looking at her, for example) and audibly (listening to them, for example) active. Like in any other public space, you are passively interacting with others, hence you are not "sitting alone".
Managers sabotage talented employees: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/what-drives-ma...
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