Imposters

This is a list of engineers on Substack, LinkedIn, and other platforms I’ve muted, hidden, or blocked to make my feed more constructive for my professional development.

Why Am I Sharing This?

I’m going to throw out an opinion that should be a cold-as-fuck take but seems increasingly unpopular these days:

You shouldn’t be able to position yourself as an expert Software Engineer without proving you have the technical chops to back it up.

It’s no secret that social media, while an amazing tool, is eroding the technical expertise of the industry. AI is only super-charging the rate at which engineers try to make a name for themselves by giving outrageously bad technical direction as rage bait to maximize their reach. Rage bait is fine if you know you have a hot take on a relevant topic, we all do it, but technical disinformation is something I refuse to engage in or tolerate in my feed.

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⚠️ This list is for social media only.
It’s not a burn notice and will never include anyone I’ve worked with or currently work with.

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Fran Soto

Provocative content like this is why I have ICs on my teams who feel seemingly entitled to not have to learn more sophisticated techniques, or at least understand the difference between complex and complicated code. The truth is that you can’t achieve simplicity without understanding complexity and how to use it strategically. He may be an engineer at Amazon but the lack of technical content on his blog speaks for itself.

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Michael Olowookere

This is technical disinformation because…

• The 👎 points are actually 👍 for using .reduce(). Hiding logic in syntax is a feature of declarative code not a bug. It is, in fact, the point. The only time .reduce() sacrifices readability for cleverness is when it’s used to handle async functions sequentially (i.e. reducing to a resolved or rejected Promise.) In most cases, it’s used to build objects from arrays in situations where Object.fromEntries() isn’t an option.

• Anyone who’s actually had to respond to an incident at 2am can tell you it’s not simple code that saves you; it’s your recognition, which is faster than recall, leveraging the mental shortcuts you’ve built up.

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Am I missing someone? Drop me a note in chat with a screenshot of the content and if I agree that it feels like disinformation then I’ll add them here.