Great code

I’ll quote Elon Musk because he said aloud what’s usually only implied at most tech companies:

Twitter will also be much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway. At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense.

This is one of the fundamental problems across the tech industry. Because engineers draw the highest salaries, there’s an assumption that they must be the most valuable, the smartest people in the room. That line of thinking continues until every problem is an engineering problem.

Unfortunatley knowledge is almost completely siloed. Writing great code doesn’t make you a designer, nor does it give you product vision.

Collectively we don’t want to admit this. The chess grandmaster isn’t likely to be brilliant outside of the realm of moving sixteen pieces on a board. It’s hard to admit this about others because then it we have to accept it about ourselves, which makes it impossible to hide just how much we can’t know.