It is posed here as “Evil”, but if you are or intend to become a Sr. SWE, this is a viable “good” thing to do. I’ve spec’d my skillset and career around it successfully. In complete self-honesty, if a problem doesn’t nerd-snipe me I am going to be mediocre at it anyways. An interesting hard problem is going to get my enthusiastic effort. Being a (successful) “troubleshooter” is often an important niche to be filled and if your current team doesn’t need one, don’t feel bad trying to find one that does.
It seems that good software developers hardly work on easy things, but that’s just because the hard things take months, and the easy things get hammered down in a matter of days.
“The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy”
It is posed here as “Evil”, but if you are or intend to become a Sr. SWE, this is a viable “good” thing to do. I’ve spec’d my skillset and career around it successfully. In complete self-honesty, if a problem doesn’t nerd-snipe me I am going to be mediocre at it anyways. An interesting hard problem is going to get my enthusiastic effort. Being a (successful) “troubleshooter” is often an important niche to be filled and if your current team doesn’t need one, don’t feel bad trying to find one that does.
It seems that good software developers hardly work on easy things, but that’s just because the hard things take months, and the easy things get hammered down in a matter of days.