one of the greatest curses of having ADHD is that I seem to be pretty good at realising when there are structural problems in a software team I'm in that are making everyone sad and slower at developing things, but this only happens because they affect me disproportionately
in the presence of good management this is I suppose fine, but in most places I've worked in so far you kind of need this magical thing called "social capital" in order to actually fix the problems, and this is very hard to gain if you're busy being bogged down by them and don't manage to ship enough code to earn the respect of your peers!
(this is one of a multitude of reasons why exclusively focusing on people's technical skills can actually be quite unhealthy; I'm really rediscovering why DEI is important from first principles lately…)
I think the 2006 notion of “Smart and Gets Things Done” has set the industry back 20 years (or whatever). People are far more complicated than that! What about people who aren't smart yet, but could be with a bit of training? Or people who would get a lot more things done if they were in the right environment, but will flounder without that help?
Even from a purely capitalistic make-more-money-with-minimum-headcount perspective, I still don't think it adds up. If you don't have anyone doing glue work your team will fall apart at the seams — yet interview processes and compensation ladders often don’t acknowledge this!
@eta I don't believe that the glue work is any less technical. And it's not just people who have ADHD who suffer from these kind of problems. It's everyone.
I personally believe that the core and root of this problem is this thing that I call tech elitism.
It basically says that you only have to apply the principles of software usability to the end product. The machine that makes the sausage does not have to adhere to any of the software usability principles. The manual should not contain any fully formed code examples. That is the essence of tech elitism.
Honestly, I really believe like... Who makes the big bucks for the corporates?? Its the people who understand usability and they know how to develop it, cultivate it, and maintain it. The disciples of Steve Krug.
That's why "libre” software is often such dog shit usability wise, because
1. Usability is legitimately hard, humiliating, and un-fun to work with; folks typically dont do this kind of work " for fun " or pro-bono
2. the market for that kind of work is so competitive, even moreso than "Basic" software development work.
And I guess a lot of corporate opensource falls into a similar trap. Why invest millions in making the sausage machine easier to operate when you already invest tens of millions on elite "ninja" sausage machine operators? Especially because doing so in an open environment will not give you a competitive advantage, it may in fact donate to all of your competitors.
