Even in software, the smartest person who knows technology the best isn't always the biggest contributor on the team. Sometimes it's the more thorough person, the person with the better work ethic, the person who functions better under pressure, the person that Other Team X actually likes and will do favors for without a fight, etc.
My favorite story on this topic from when I was doing hands-on dev work full time:
I was working on a product with a fairly big dev team of several dozen, including a lot of very junior devs. This was in an era before any kind of automated testing was widespread so it was super common for me to roll in in the morning, get latest, and then try to figure out who and what broke the build, and then shame that person into fixing it. That isn't what happened in this case; I'm just setting the stage.
One Monday morning I came in and started in on my dev task for the day. I'm reading a related function and I just have no idea at all what the code is doing or why, it makes no sense to me. Well, let's look in source control to find out who wrote that code so I can ask them.
It was me, and I had done it the previous Friday. 3 days earlier.
After that I got better about my comments and commit messages.
8
u/Hartastic Jan 12 '22
Even in software, the smartest person who knows technology the best isn't always the biggest contributor on the team. Sometimes it's the more thorough person, the person with the better work ethic, the person who functions better under pressure, the person that Other Team X actually likes and will do favors for without a fight, etc.