You are looking at this from your perspective, which is either pass or fail.
From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.
Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.
It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.
I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).
Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.
I program at a non-tech Fortune 100 company. Our team is on a pilot program to try out AI-assisted programming at the company, and Cursor with OpenAI models are mostly what we are using. I have it integrated into my standard IDE workflow and try to write unit tests and the like with it.
I got a gig from who's hiring a few years ago. I also interviewed at some other places which were not a fit. Some places never got back to me. It has been a mix.
I went to a state school (cheap) and took one class a semester - usually at night, sometimes on a weekend. So I'd work until 5, then take a class from say 7 to 830 every Tuesday and Thursday.
In 2009 the economy sank and I was laid off. I was able to go back full time for a while. I was already enrolled and everything, I just started taking 4-5 classes a semester instead of 1, I was also able to take them during the day for a while.
$80k over four years is a certain amount, $80k over more years is less. I think I paid less per than $20,000 for a year's worth of classes. Some people got Pell grants and financial aid, although I just paid for it cash.
One thing I do is go to Leetcode, see the optimal big O time and space solutions, then give the LLM the Leetcode medium/hard problem, and limit it to the optimal big O time/space solution and suggest the method (bidirectional BFS). I ask for the solution in some fairly mainstream modern language (although not Javascript, Java or Python). I also say to do it as compact as possible. Sometimes I reiterate that.
It's just a function usually, but it does not always compile. I'd set this as a low bar for programming. We haven't even gotten into classes, architecture, badly-defined specifications and so on.
LLMs are useful for programming, but I'd want them to clear this low hurdle first.
You're using a shitty model then or are lying. 4o one or two shotted the first 12 days of advent of code for me without anything other than the problem description.
Ahh yes. Because that other AI model is 100% perfect. Gee whiz.
Man the people working on these machines, selling them, and using them lack the very foundational knowledge of information theory.
Let alone understanding the humanities and politics. Subjectively speaking, humans will never be satisfied with any status quo. Ergo there is no closed-form solution to meeting human wants.
Now disrupting humans' needs, for profit, that is well understood.
Sam Altman continuing to stack billions after allegedly raping his sister.
It's not ironic that technologists use very barebones and minimal websites with minimal automation. It's telling.
I already ditched my smartphone last month because it was 100% spam, scammers, and bots giving me notifications.
Apparently it's too much to ask to receive a well-informed and engaged society without violence and theft. So I don't take anyone at their word and even less so would trust automated data mining, tracking and profiling that seeks to guide my decision making.
Buy me a drink first SV before you crawl that far up my ass.
I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well.
In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.
Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
Well, as another "OG", I'll give you a contrary opinion.
Yes, absolutely, business cycles come and go. But I think there is a really large shift in the overall "technology mindset", and this is something that does feel very new.
I would say that from at least the 70s (just using that because it's my birth decade) up until the mid 2010s or so, pretty much everyone viewed technology as the main driver for societal progress. Sure, there were definitely scary parts of technology (leaded gas, nuclear weapons), but people still felt overall that improvements in technology would lead to improvements in people's lives.
I'm not so sure that optimism exists anymore, nor do I necessarily think it should. I see so much of the tech industry not focused on how to improve people's lives with technology, but on things like how can we addict people to dopamine spikes, or how can we insert ourselves as an intermediary that vacuums up all the profit due to many technologies' natural tendency toward monopoly. I see technology as the primary cause of what I consider the slowly increasing societal disintegration that is happening across many countries.
Even with technology like AI which I think has a huge potential to aid humanity, my greater fear is that it will just lead to much greater concentration of wealth and power and the expense of everyone else.
For sure, part of my pessimism probably comes from the timeline of my career, which started during the extreme optimism of the 90s, when we all thought that the Internet was going to democratize societies even more and that it was going to "bring us all together". When you feel like the opposite happened, it can be tough to come to terms with that.
post-WW2 optimism that is now dying off with the last of the Greatest Generation and their kids, the Boomers.
by the 1970s the post-WW2 boom was over and the 80s were full of doom and gloom -- and then tech exploded and there was all this new growth. but now capitalism did what it does and we're back to the 80s again, this time with China instead of Japan.
As someone who remembers the 80s quite well, I think it's a giant mistake to just say this is some kind of cyclical, "Oh, it's like the 80s again" moment.
While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.
Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.
> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side hustles that I devote time to.
> when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know the language and platform we're using, and general programming (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for them in terms of doing more.
> a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.
Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty hours (if that) a week.
We say grind out Leetcode, because if someone can't do a Leetcode medium (or hard) like finding a cycle in a linked list in a few minutes, it diminishes their chances of getting into FAANG. It might be the bare minimum nowadays, but if they can't do even that, it is where they should start.
We're not telling people to grind Leetcode because we think Leetcode is great, we're telling people to grind Leetcode because this is usually one of the steps you need to do to get in.
From my personal experience, those people even during the pandemic hiring craze weren't making it in. Because once I start asking you questions about your experience, things quickly fall apart if you don't understand software dev
I dunno how other companies work, but when it came to Amazon, if you were struggling with a coding problem, and I gave you a hint on the solution, and you ran with it, usually that wasn't a big concern if you could talk about your experience (even during basic college projects), where you showed evidence of being able to deferentially think about things, not just follow patterns that you have been taught.
I do agree that you should know how to do Leetcode and spend time practicing, but grinding them out isn't what I would recommend. The vast majority of Leetcode medium problems are some form of pointer manipulation, linked list (single, trees, or n way like Trie structure), and some O Log N search, which usually involves a sorted data set. The key to learn is how to map a problem into those things, and how to operate on them, not how to solve a specific set of problems.
Its the same reason why ECE/EE people usually have no issue getting coding jobs at FAANG, because they are so used to low level memory operations and optimizations on how to do stuff that they can easily recognize the patterns.
> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In the US you do.
> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.
>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.
Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?
For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.
What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself
i just launched a website a month ago to sell sweet potatoes online and i ran a bunch of google ads. now i have a b2b revenue stream selling sweet potatoes to medical diagnostic test manufacturers.
please, with the original snark style from your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42632061, tell me more about how it is a waste of my time to find businesses to do business with my brand new business and instead just find a stable job?
hard to debate these things with people who are born and bred into “slave for someone else” mentality and think like $350k is great salary one should be happy with slaving away at some cubicle in the Bay or at home 12 hours per day… :)
America is great at making sure most people think this way…
I wake up in the morning, role out of bed, walk over to my home office, shut down my computer after 8 hours and get on with my life.
I don’t have to worry about finding customers, I have unlimited paid PTO and I plan to take 30 days this year not including 10 paid holidays.
My wife and I travel a lot and we did the digital nomad thing for a year.
If the company decides they don’t want to employ me anymore, I find another job like I have done 10 times in my career including last year and the year before. Both times it took three weeks.
I don’t live in the Bay Area , I live in a nice condo with access to 5 pools, a private to the condo association fishing lake and two gyms, bars and restaurants all within walking distance in state tax free Florida.
i have all this (though i only work 4-6 hours a day when selling my time to other people), and i also have side income selling sweet potatoes and it didn't take much of my precious free time away. currently, it's earning me a similar hourly rate as my development rate (senior developer/lead developer/architecting infrastructure, etc). you are correct that it doesn't replace my income, but that was never the point. that income will help me weather any job loss etc, but more importantly, against your advice, i can potentially grow the business to a point that it replaces my income. and if you really want to be like, "that will never pay your bills," then that is 100% false if i put all of that income into stocks and the money grows to a point twenty years from now that i can use that money to pay my bills. and i'm also able to find a job quickly if i need to, just like you. which i guess, based on your experience, one can be extremely shortsighted person and still find a job quickly.
I have a years worth of expenses in in an HYSA outside of my retirement accounts that will help me “weather a job loss” and a set of skills that I’m 100% sure that someone will give me a job or contract before my money runs out. I work full time for a consulting company now - and I’ve worked in cloud consulting for almost five years including three and half working at AWS.
I have been working professionally for 28 years across 10 jobs. I assure you I’m not “short sighted”.
i'm happy for you and glad you figured out a way to navigate this rough finanical world. but we live in a different world now. i'm 33 and that strategy just will not be as reliable in the future. it's a losing strategy imo, at least for what i want out of life. what works for me might not work for you. telling other people that their approach is wrong is very shortsighted.
I mentored an intern when I was at AWS and worked with a few other new grads and continued to mentor the returning intern after they graduated.
After three or four years in the industry, if they suck up everything they can and take advantage of every opportunity, they will be set.
The same is true to a much lesser extent on the enterprise dev. I tell people on that side just not to be a “ticket taker” and volunteer to have larger more impactful products - “don’t be the bullet. Be the gun”
i've been mentored by dudes in their 50s who think they are providing a good to the world by mentoring young people (aka dad energy), then later received real mentorship from folks my age and a decade older than me. most likely they took what you said with a grain of salt and realized that you are out of touch.
It’s “dad energy” that you are doing. I’m telling people to “grind leetcode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and to learn how to pass system design and behavioral interviews and pointing them to resources.
Whose advice is going to lead to better outcomes? Doing drop shipping from Ali baba and selling sweet potatoes on line or mine?
While I haven’t had to pass a coding interview at BigTech, I have had to pass system design and behavioral interviews at one and I have conducted a couple at BigTech.
I’m telling them to work to demonstrate skills with working at increasing “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.
i wasn't suggesting that you were out of touch with technology, i was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach. this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in. a lot of people tell me that your way is right for me, but i disagree. a corporate 9-5 makes me want to kms, not exaggerating. i think we have fundamentally different worldviews and that's ok.
> My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.
we are no different. i'm leading a project to deploy an etl pipeline on azure kubernetes right now.
> was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation
My generation for the most part never will work for a FAANG or get equivalent compensation because we aren’t going to grind leetcode and do what it takes.
I would never have gotten into one if it weren’t for the very thin needle I threaded and I definitely wasn’t going to sell my big house in the burbs to move to Seattle to be an SDE (what the recruiter originally suggested).
There are plenty of people who post here who are under 30 and will make more than I will ever make. I’m not bitter. Like I said at 50, I can afford to purposefully prioritize lifestyle over chasing money and eschew opportunities to make more.
My Generation didn’t have the chance of graduating from college and getting a job making an (inflation adjusted) almost quarter million working for BigTech or the equivalent company back then. Many in my generation came in during the dot com boom and it took years for us to recover and some never did (I didn’t suffer any ill effects from the crash).
From looking at LinkedIn, none of them are or have ever worked for a company paying as much as my former coworkers at BigTech are making 3-4 years out of college.
The generation graduating post 2010-2012 has way more opportunities to make a lot of money.
gen x in tech are some of the wealthiest people in the world. y'all are the new kings.
i graduated high school during the great financial crisis. i remember being near done with college at the university of mississippi when i visited birmingham, alabama and walked through the occupy encampments. i didn't make enough money to contribute to retirement savings til 2019 when i was in my late 20s. your generation has experienced unprecedented stock market gains over your peak earning years. i'm not hopeful that these gains will continue through my peak earning years therefore i prioritize finding creative ways to generate income before it's too late after being complacent with my fat ass tech paycheck sitting at my standup desk and drinking my kombucha with the wool over my eyes while the ai writes my code.
And you were on the opposite side of the bimodal distribution of comp within the industry from 2012-2019.
The top end of enterprise dev salaries for seniors is around that of entry level salaries at BigTech and adjacent companies.
That’s not meant to be an insult. I was on that side until I was 46 and now at 50 I’m back on the very top end of enterprise dev. But it’s still somewhere between entry level and mid level at BigTech and closer to entry level.
The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
If you graduated in 2008, yes it was a shit show. But that means by 2012, BigTech comp and enterprise dev comp started really diverging. The stock market has been gangbusters since 2012. But it stagnated most of the 200x’s.
If you had jumped on the BigTech wave in 2012 you would have been set.
By that time, relocating wasn’t an option for me because I was 38, just gotten married and had two (step)kids.
i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.
> The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now. nonetheless, we are not talking about maximizing income here, we're talking about surviving in a changing world with a tougher job market for devs. let me remind you of the grandparent orginal comment that started this all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631755 that person is right.
> i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.
Yeah for an entry level developer getting in the industry right before Covid hit had to suck.
> this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now.
The entire market sucks now. But BigTech is still hiring as well as the enterprise dev side. You might as well shoot for the moon and settle if you must.
i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach.
100% this.
this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in
that sounds fucking amazing!!!!! I think the main “disagreement” we have is that I truly believe there are too many people thinking that FAANG-driven career is fullfilling and something that should be taught to new kids that are coming into our industry. I am now and will spend the rest of my career pleading with them to choose a more fullfilling and rewarding career
If I were 22 in 2025 instead of being 22 in 1996, I would definitely do what I needed to do to exchange as much money as possible for my labor instead of toiling away at an enterprise dev job making $70K a year when instead I could be graduating college making $170K to $200k+.
I did do my bid in a FAANG working remotely between the ages of 46-49 and I saw first hand the doors it opens and the experience that college grads had that they couldn’t get anywhere else,
Hell, it open doors for me. There is no way I could have found jobs as quickly as I did both last year and the year before without it.
Also even at 46-49 I learned a lot that has helped me since I left.
On another note: after my youngest graduated, my wife and I sold everything we owned and after traveling for a year, we settled down in our vacation home (a unit in a condotel we own).
We rent it out when we decide to travel for an extended period of time. The “hotel” part of the condotel takes care of everything.
Are you making at least $80K a year? Again that’s what an entry level CRUD developer can make. They would be much better off preparing for interviews than selling sweet potatoes on line
Actually I am. When I get off of work, I don’t think about work. I am either exercising, hanging out with my family or friends, traveling (I work remotely and I could very well be working during the day and doing something at night in a different city).
This discussion was about creating a business instead of working for someone else.
I bet you that you could make more money by spending your time doing interview prep and changing jobs than you could selling potatoes on the side.
btw spending time marketing yourself is much more effective than interview prep in my experience. i got every single one of my jobs because i know how to sell myself. all the jobs i've gotten did not include an algorithmic interview. i can only think of one algorithmic interview i've done in my career, and it was early in my career and helpful to learn my knowledge gaps as a mostly self-taught developer. i did not spend any time doing "interview prep" after that, but simply learned the CS fundamentals that i was bad at. that has helped me so far. not 1337 code or whatever the fuck.
but that doesn't matter. i work 4-6 hours a day selling my time at a high hourly rate. this gives me more free time to do all the things i want to do. i chill hard as fuck. walk 90 minutes a day, sell sweet potatoes on the internet, grow my food, write books, and work on my saas app.
i recommend doing this if you are like me. don't work a 9-5, unless you use it to help get you to this point.
Check my other comments on this submission - I got into BigTech without doing any coding too - AWS ProServe.
But I am self aware enough to know that isn’t a repeatable process that most people can do anymore than “selling potatoes online”.
I don’t have to “market myself”. My job at AWS fell into my lap more or less then after leaving, with that on my resume and LinkedIn profile along with my other experience, people reach out to me. I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
actually selling sweet potatoes. if you would listen!
> I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
i have 139 followers on twitter. i don't tweet about tech. "marketing" is simply one html document on the public internet that clearly communicates to technical and non-technical people what you can do for them. not what skills you have.
Corollary: This role can also be filled by someone of Asian heritage who was raised in the US, and who speaks English very well, as well as some Asian language proficiently.
- That still doesn't address the core issue which isn't inherently racial. It's that if you come from a certain part of the world, there's an effective glass ceiling for you and all of your achievements and hard work has to go through a Western person, whose only attribute is being more palatable to Western tastes. Not hard work, not technical expertise, not spending sleepless nights getting the blocker bugs fixed so that the product can ship on time. What do you think that does to morale? And is it morally right to run a company this way?
- A person named Sean Goedecke probably isn't that person anyways.
If you go to China or India and work there you can see it now. I doubt the whole phenomenon in question is real in the US, but I do believe that you would see this kind of crap in Asia.
From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.
Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.
It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.
I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).
Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.