1. I was in a project which had this "STAR" developer, so basically everyone consultant him for code reviews, architectural discussions and the major implementation of the code was given to him. At first I wanted to be that guy, Although he was rude at times, but still I pinged him any time I needed something.
As time passed, I realized few things:
- Whenever I started to explain him the problem, he would say "No No..." and would explain what the problem is without listening to me. Since he was the "STAR" developer I would note his points and do exactly what he said. And when I would come back to him after his solution didn't work. He would then actually check and tell me the problem which I knew on the first place.
- Even after asking him several times to include me in architectural discussions, he would not do so. Since I was junior to him, I never asked him why, but still pinged him everytime I knew some discussions would happen.
- He once told me a do a bug fix with the same ticket which was for a feature implementation unrelated to the bug. He told our inept manager that the fix would take only two hours, But guess what! it took me 2 weeks (no exaggeration) to finally fix it as the whole code was not modular and multiple related commits happened. I was unaware of modularity/design patterns/lints/techDebt, just heard a few of these somewhere.
2. There was this another guy, who wanted to replace him. He was a "wanna be STAR developer". Its funny how enthusiastically he behaved whenever our product would go for client demos to get interested clients but would fail miserably. Actually he knew how to debug the whole code (cpp/c users might know how tedious it is) so he helped me a lot. But 30% of the time, he would give me free lectures "you should do this, that" etc. whenever I asked for help.
For months I would study long nights, prepare for DSA/SysDes interviews, and with all the blessings, I got selected at a best product based company(Hint: u probably use its one tool everyday).
Just 3 months within the new company, I realized something:
The real software engineers understand an algorithm/design, have the patience to break an unknown problem and then are able to create their own algorithms, using existing algo as a reference points. Like Directors and Writers. All their creation seems to come from nowhere, but they are all amalgamation of existing ideas with a new garb.
Also, I found most of them very humble and eager to learn kind a guys
The STAR developer are pretentious dumb fellows who would mug up an algo and puke it out in an interview.
I remember my interview at T. The girl asked me a question which I solved with O(1) space. She was convinced that the code is wrong and was about to move to next question, But I opened an online IDE, pasted the code with the input and ran it successfully. She pretended to test it with some "EDGE" cases which were far from being edgy.
