alt Hacker NewsYou know, this is kind of a funny take at some level. Like, for any surgery, you want the doctor who has done the same operation 10 times, not the one who has 10 years of "many hat doctoring" experience.
I'm not really arguing anything here, but it is interesting that we value breadth over (hopefully) depth/mastery of a specific thing in regards to what we view as "Senior" in software.
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Ops vs Dev
Situational Leadership gets into this. You want a really efficient McDonalds worker who follows the established procedure to make a Big Mac. You also want a really creative designer to build your Big Mac marketing campaign. Your job as a manager is figuring out which you need, and fitting the right person into the right job.
“This person is incurious” would be more apt but also more likely to apply to everyone else in the room too.
Didn’t Bruce Lee famously say he fears the man who’s authored one API in ten thousand different contexts?
If we extrapolate the Dr example:
There is the one doctor who learned one way to do the operation at school, with specific instruments, sutures etc. and uses that for 1000 surgeries.
And then there's the curious one who actively goes to conferences, reads publications and learns new better ways to do the same operation with invisible sutures that don't leave a scar or tools that are allow for more efficient operations, cutting down the time required for the patient to be under anaesthesia.
Which one would you hire for your hospital for the next 25 years?
I once asked an obstetrician how she could tell the sex of a fetus with those ultrasound blobs. She laughed and said she'd seen 50,000 of those scans.
You want the Dr who has done the operation 10 times, and learned something each time, and incorporated that into their future efforts. You probably don’t want a Dr who will do their 11th surgery on you exactly the way they did the first.
This is what that saying is about