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- Writes tedious, multiplicative code and never stops to reflect on opportunities to express things more efficiently.

- Writes docs littered with misused buzzwords (especially "leverage" and "platform") that are at best useless, and more often actively misleading.

- When not sure what to do, muddles through with the first nightmarish idea to come to mind, rather than taking a step back and trying to simplify or seeking prior art. No aesthetic sensibility, no innate revulsion to garbage code.

- Has no sense of how long things should take, and no problem spinning for 3 weeks on a half-day task they're delegated.

- Approves train-wreck pull requests.

- Executes every CR suggestion, even those that make things worse.

- Attempts a bad deploy 3 or 4 times before wondering why they are hitting the auto-rollback trigger; assumes something is wrong with the deployment system.

- After 30 seconds of shallow thought, writes off any production issue they're asked to debug (including emergency pages) as "must be network" or "must be database" and fires off a vague bug report to sit in somebody's queue for 6 months before being closed for insufficient detail while the fire continues to burn.

- Gracefully acknowledges design feedback, but goes with their original plan anyways. Or more likely, built the thing weeks before soliciting design approval and won't go back to change it.

- Very interested in getting promoted; not at all interested in technical depth, novelty, or quality.




Sounds like a 0.1x engineer.


Sorry, what are you enumerating/describing?


Opinions on a coworker they look down on, most likely.


The baseline behavior, above which anything is ">1x."


I've definitely been guilty of the things on this list many times. I really appreciate this list and will try to reflect on it since it could help me catch myself in the act and take the right course of action instead.Thanks!




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