Jul 15, 2011

Specialization is for insects

Heinlein - Specialization is for Insects

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

<--snip-->

Similarly, in my view :

An engineer in an internet company should be able to think of ideas, build prototypes, translate feature specs (or discussions) into workable components, design architecture, write good code, review code, monitor servers, scale applications, analyze logs, plan capacity, design databases, implement and use caching efficiently , tweak web servers, tweak databases, build fast, release faster..

2 comments:

Sharad said...

Awesome snippet! Especially, 'plan an invasion'. This is inspirational!

But the Engineer still doesn't sound human by definition. He needs to die gallantly, etc!

Santosh Sood said...
This comment has been removed by the author.