
Rise of the Shaman Programmer - daftpanda
https://blog.sourcerer.io/the-rise-of-the-shaman-programmer-f13a54810961
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PaulHoule
Personally how much I understand the system I am working on is a function of
myself and the system at that point in time.

Sometimes I have been new to a system and had to fix a problem in a hurry and
had an incomplete understanding.

Sometimes six months later I understand what really went wrong.

Years ago there was a bug in the Linux 2.4 kernel that I understood so far as
"sometimes there is a null pointer in this particular place" and was able to
make a patch that mitigated the effect of the null pointer. I never understood
why there was a null pointer in that place and it wasn't worth doing because
Linux 2.4 was hopelessly broken.

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oldmancoyote
It's good to draw attention to this, but is it new? Newton said "We stand on
the shoulders of giants."

The potential(actual?) problem with this is it can necessitate crippling
specialization. Who maintains an overview? Who directs goals and avoids
harmful drift is the overall direction?

Maintaining the overview is perfectly practical, but who does it, what is
their motivation, and how is it legitimized?

