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A coworker recently got fired, not in the blunt “You’re fired!” way that Trump made his name with, but in the quieter, more civil way of not getting his contract extended. He’s also not really my coworker, he works for the government - my current client, but he’s equally responsible for the current project.

Let’s call him Bob. Bob is a messily-dressed man in his forties, and a hard worker, trying to help out whenever possible, volunteering to pick up bits of the project, a script here, a database table there, when he doesn’t have to. And from some overheard (unintentional) phone calls, I know he’s got a family to take care of.

Yet, I’ve never despised anyone more in my short time working.

To say that Bob is incompetent would be putting it very nicely, despite the decades of experience, he is somehow completely clueless, making his helpfulness more of a curse, every bit of extra responsibility he offers to take is another hidden timebomb for me and my teammates to discover, and I’ve been blown up many times.

To make matters worse, Bob also has influence over the design of the backend, as expected, none of his decisions make sense, and everyone else have to brute force their way around every design flaw to get anything running, turning my codebases - desperate attempts from me trying to make sense of code written by even less competent outsourced devs, into even more of a mess.

My rant stops here, there are other things to be polemic about - him not knowing what parameters an endpoint should have, despite being the one using it, or his arrogance at the beginning of the project (Which quickly evaporated once he realized that everyone else’s brain ran at much higher clock speeds.), despite my vitriol and gratitude that I will no longer deal with him soon, I feel a tinge of sadness watching him shuffling around work, because unsurprisingly, everyone else at work is not a fan of him either.

As part of my plan to achieve some sort of personal development this year, I decided to make an attempt in reading again. After a few months of not actually reading, I stumbled upon Taleb’s Skin In The Game on a very boring Friday afternoon, where I read half the book on my work laptop instantly.

The book is very impressive, enough that I went out and bought a paperback copy (Along with the Black Swan, his most popular book.), and breezed through the remaining half in a few days. The book, and by extension its author, is not perfect, Taleb is confident in his ideas to the point of narcissism, and he has his own biases - you will be familiar with who he does not like within a dozen pages: the majority of economists, people in academia studying “fake” fields like intersectionality, fundamentalist Islamists, and so on. However I think it’s good that an author occasionally goes too far, the combination of his provocative prose and cold rationality forces you to think about his ideas seriously - and he doesn't care if you disagree.

Regardless, Skin In The Game is a fascinating collection of discussions on risk and the title phrase, where Taleb defines it as having a shared risk when taking any decision, and not just sharing the rewards. The examples of this are clear and plentiful - a trader playing with other people’s money will start taking massive gambles if he is not punished for losing said money, economists can keep creating abstract models despite their previous ones failing to predict real-world behavior, or political pundits detached enough from reality supporting interventionist policies that bring untold harm to the world (particularly in the global south), and so on.

In trying to relate to the examples mentioned in the book, I thought about work, as an overworked junior at the bottom of the ladder, I evidently have skin in the game, if I write shoddy code, I bear the extra responsibility of fixing it when it eventually blows up, and if the blowups are severe enough (Suppose I somehow deleted a whole table), my coworkers will also have to deal with it, and vice versa.

That’s a normal state of affairs, no one writes perfect code, and looking out for each other and putting out metaphorical fires is part of working as a team (In fact, it is the key benefit of working in one.), but what if you are a literal software arsonist? What if you are the human personification of the Code Taliban?

The examples of people with no skin in the game that Taleb gives are people that either don’t face responsibility, or are in the wrong context - The trader gambler faces no jail time for his actions, and is bailed out with taxpayer money; The economist at least tries to model reality better, even if his theories only work in carefully constructed scenarios; The political pundit fails to understand a situation thousands of miles away… because it is thousands of miles away, and they would not like seeing civilians get blown up (for the most part), despite it being a direct result of their stance.

But Bob is in the same context as I am, and faces the same responsibilities as I do for missteps, and yet he missteps all the same. He’s got every bit of his skin in the game, yet it changes nothing. To be completely honest, it is frightening to consider myself in his shoes.

I’m clueless when it comes to certain things, I’m hopelessly unathletic, my friends consider me just as much of a threat in the kitchen as Bob in any codebase, and my romantic life can be best compared to the Sahara, regardless, these concern me and me alone - if I fry up some Spam and put it in some instant ramen along with a slice of Kraft cheese (They actually do this regularly in Korea, I argue it is a regional delicacy.), I’m the one eating it, and there’s no problem despite the disapproval from my friends. Now suppose if I was a chef working at a Michelin-starred restaurant and made the same meal, it is no longer the same, as someone else will have to eat it, and if they aren’t into high-sodium food like I am, everyone working at the restaurant suffers the consequences along with me, whether it is from bad reviews from critics, a dwindling number of patrons, or general disgust from the public.

For a young man like myself, if I found out that I really was not cut out for software development, for example, discovering that I can’t understand what a pointer is during my undergraduates, I have all the time in the world to switch majors, or even careers, I can afford to keep searching for something I have the talent and passion for. But when I see Bob, pushing 50, earnestly asking me why loading 30000 rows of data from a .json file is slower than loading 1500 rows from a database, I realize that he does not have the same luxury as I do. What can he do? I don’t have an answer.

As a field, software development requires continuous learning - only knowing how to churn out CRUD APIs is a surefire way of ensuring your next job search to be a struggle, I know what I signed up for, and so far I’ve been faring well, learning the project’s software stack, and cracking some of the harder project requirements all on my own. The “architect” that’s supposed to figure these out for me simply threw his hands up and said he doesn’t know, despite having a license from the company “proving” otherwise. Like Bob, he’s also incompetent, but unlike Bob, he doesn’t get in my way, instead keeping to himself, happily stealing paychecks from the company.

When I first started writing this post, I was hoping that some sort of conclusion would come to me as I write, some sort of satisfying answer to Bob’s predicament, maybe that I could have convinced myself that it’s fine to be bad at your job, that I simply should care less… But I can’t. It’s inherently unfair that other people have to pay the price for one’s incompetence, it’s not the type of unfairness that is outside of one’s control - I do not curse my parents for not being millionaires.

It’s very easy to throw my hands up and claim that Bob is just lazy, finding some sort of individual flaw that I can attribute his incompetence on, but I don’t think that’s fair either, I think the reality could be much more harrowing: What if he just… can’t?

Software development isn’t that easy, and it’s not farfetched to claim that some people are just less skilled at it. A cursory glance at the ranking system for any competitive game tells you that skill is often distributed in a bell curve, and there are people out there that are hardstuck silver despite their best efforts. It’s a sobering thought that effort does not always lead to ability, that being able to see growth from effort is more of a blessing than one imagines.

On that note, I guess all I can say is I’m glad I have the ability to improve, deliver when it counts, and keep it up as long as I can… lest I become another Bob somewhere down the line.

Written 31.03.2025