Street fighting engineers vs. martial arts engineers

I feel like these aren&#x27;t always personality traits, but rather often indicate the kinds of work environments one has been exposed to.<p>I would characterize myself as more of a &quot;Martial Artist&quot; at heart. I find creating quality code gratifying for its own sake. I have an academic CS education. The majority of my early career was spent at a mature organization with lots of process in place and a reputation for engineering excellence. I love tools engineering and other internal work that makes others more productive, rather than the trench warfare of supporting consumer apps with thousands and thousands of users.<p>Yet, over the past two years at startups I feel I have taken on a lot more &quot;Street Fighter&quot; characteristics in order to cope. I let objectively bad code slide in reviews if it puts out a fire or we won&#x27;t scale to meet its limitations soon. I fix serious issues and operational headaches under the table, because they would fester for months unprioritized otherwise. I start talking directly to management at the year mark instead of waiting for raises, because most startups just don&#x27;t bother setting any expectations at all on that front.<p>It&#x27;s important to realize that not all Martial Artists will be that way forever. And your organization might be what makes them hang up their black belt and pick up some brass knuckles. Or vice versa - a Street Fighter might tire of building and rebuilding half-baked spaghetti wire solutions and decide to go somewhere they can just focus on one thing and collect a paycheck.

A friend of mine who&#x27;s both a kick ass engineer and great product manager once told me this analogy, which is employing similar to the one in the article:<p>&quot;For any software project to succeed, you need three types of developers:<p>The kamikaze. They kick off the project, they don&#x27;t care about the mountain on the horizon or the abyss less than ten clicks ahead. They get everyone on board and they will also give the column directions and keep them on track.<p>The soldier. They just march on and on. They may take longer to solve a problem, but they don&#x27;t tire. They keep at it.<p>The sniper. Any really difficult issue they will just take out. But they need calm and solitude to do their deed.&quot;

I kinda like this analogy, though the idea of street fighting is pretty unsavory in real life. Whereas Martial Artist in the article&#x27;s analogy is like suburban children&#x27;s Karate classes leading to later study for organized sports competitions and exhibitions. (BTW, IIUC, there are other kinds of study of martial arts, including people who focus on internal development separate from external accomplishments.)<p>Even though it&#x27;s unsavory, I did use a &quot;scrappy street kid fighter&quot; analogy on HN a couple months ago, criticizing some academic attempt to make declarations about software engineering. Then spun that into one of my favorite topics, which is startups and other smaller companies playing house self-destructively, by cargo-culting behaviors of insulated massive megacorps. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34753570" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34753570</a><p>Instead, we need to lean more towards scrappy street-smarts than we have been during much of &quot;tech&quot;. (We also need to always learn from our predecessors and conteporaries, but to be smart about it, not cargo-cult, so I&#x27;m focusing on the smart part first.)

first &quot;code ninjas&quot; now &quot;street fighting&quot; engineers and &quot;martial art&quot; engineers? really? I feel like these monikers are getting a little silly especially since you&#x27;d never see the reverse.

Fun analogy, but let&#x27;s look at the Martial Artist environment<p>&gt; There are basic ground rules (clear requirements) which the opponents (problems) are NOT allowed to break. eg: below the belt punches, (changing priorities every week) etc.<p>Who does get to work in such an environment? I can only think of:<p>* Academia<p>* Artificial environments (e.g. leetcode, coding competitions)<p>* MAYBE very mature products in established companies<p>For the vast majority of us changing requirements, unknown unknowns and technology shifts are our daily bread. Big, unchanging upfront design doesn&#x27;t work, and we&#x27;ve known this for several decades now.

First, 10x devs are so pathetic to read about, but:<p>What I like with this article is the difference in how you approach a problem depending on how you are functioning as a human being. Of course it is nowhere near of the real world, but I think all of us can identify people we worked with who are really efficient on both of these &quot;sides&quot;.

I really like this dichotomy.<p>Over time I&#x27;m becoming more and more aware of non-skill factors that affect my impact.<p>I&#x27;m definitely more a street fighter, and I feel limited when I&#x27;m given martial artist work and there is very little opportunity for street fighter work.<p>I think it can be very difficult to be a 10x engineer because you have to be in an org that has the right type of work, be on a team that&#x27;s involved in that work, and be in a role in which you&#x27;re given that work.<p>Working at a big company as a SWE (As opposed to e.g. SRE) I&#x27;ve found that the street fighter work is very limited and generally only specific teams and people get to work on it.

When I first read the headline I read it as the engineers behind the game street fighter.

Martial arts for the projects, street figthters for the products. Good engineers are always valuable but everyone shines differently in different situations.

I would like to propose another candidate: Street-Fighter with Martial Arts training.

“The street fighters mostly have scars and reputation in closed groups. To find them you have to talk to folks in that closed group.”<p>What closed group would that be, since by definition they are not part of a particular group? A martial artist sounds like the guy that got a product of the ground and would likely be part of the founder group; not likely looking to do it again.

A rather contrived or ridiculous post.<p>&gt; I have worked with 2 types of 10x engineers so far: Martial Artists, Street fighters<p>It then goes on to say which you should have. Duh if they&#x27;re each 10x, both.<p>The article set up a false dichotomy in its premise.

Nice distinction, I&#x27;m definitely a street fighter engineer myself, and I often struggle to understand martial arts engineers. This article helps with that in a weird kind of visceral way.

From the headline I thought this was going to be about software engineers who do Martial Arts as an hobby. I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and there are a lot of software engineers in that sport.

Sales reps come from the street fighter mindset. If you hire people like that, they have to be given external targets to fight. Otherwise much energy is drained off in internal fights.<p>&quot;The Gamesman&quot; (Maccoby, 1978) divided workers into &quot;craftsmen&quot;, &quot;organization men&quot;, &quot;jungle fighters&quot;, and &quot;gamesmen&quot;. Same concept, earlier decade.

I&#x27;m kind of reminded of my counter to Didier Verna&#x27;s &quot;Lisp, Jazz, Aikido&quot; meme: Visual Basic, Punk Rock, MMA.

I feel like over time I’ve learned that I don’t really have the discipline for marital arts, but that I’m scrappy enough to get by as a street fighter. I appreciate martial artists, but I just can’t devote myself to the art the way it deserves.

Does anyone else enjoy these cheesy blogs even if they read like astrology or phrenology?

And there are also the ones that kiss up the referee and win through politics. But without the referee get knocked out with one punch.<p>They have no use in a real fight, but companies are full of them.

It seems similar to the analogy of a circus lion vs a wild lion.

I struggle to understand what insight is gained from this article. Can anyone explain how this could be useful?

Its street fighting engineers vs marvel superhero engineers.

Sounds a bit like ADHD vs ASD

Thank you for sharing this! It is helpful in explaining things easier

Most martial arts are worthless in a real street fight.

I do well in almost any technical environment but am able to drill down and specialise down the deeper rabbit holes when needed. Sometimes my theoretical knowledge is spotty and lets me down though so I guess I’m more Ryu than Bruce Lee. I’m definitely more around the 7.5x - 8x than 10x though.