> I've never experienced this mythological 10x rockstar figure that works alone creating impossible to maintain systems, and I've worked closely with dozens of engineers.
I've seen this plenty of times.
Recently I was trying to explain the pros and cons of micro-services, and more importantly, microrepos, with regards to automated testing. The lead engineer that said he'd quit if I colocated the tests with the app.
Same place, they replaced all deploy system with argo, but every environment is pinned against main, which means you can no longer test a change without it going to all environments at the same time.
In both cases, the engineers are actually much higher skilled than average and churn out / lead change, but they'd rather be chasing a fad and just don't care if their changes shit on other parts of the SDLC.
That case sounds more like you being 0.1x developer about obsessing over test automation, where the 1x guy just didn't seem them to be worthwile.
Personally I have had clashes during my career with people who obsess about unit testing way too much in places where it just doesn't add any value (in fact destroys it by requiring lots of work and additional mainteinance). Value in the end is quite a subjective thing so it doesn't make sense to argue that much about it.
So have I, and I'm pretty impressed you could decipher that from a single comment, and it doesn't reflect poorly on you at all that you immediately drew such a conclusion from someone refusing to discuss pros and cons of solutions.
I've seen this plenty of times.
Recently I was trying to explain the pros and cons of micro-services, and more importantly, microrepos, with regards to automated testing. The lead engineer that said he'd quit if I colocated the tests with the app.
Same place, they replaced all deploy system with argo, but every environment is pinned against main, which means you can no longer test a change without it going to all environments at the same time.
In both cases, the engineers are actually much higher skilled than average and churn out / lead change, but they'd rather be chasing a fad and just don't care if their changes shit on other parts of the SDLC.