Sunday, early, everyone asleep. Old memory, uninvited.
Years ago, a place that moved a lot of money very fast. Small job, build a prototype nobody could describe yet. The man looked at my CV and said it out loud: you're overqualified.
I said what he needed was someone critical, and someone who had shipped a product from a spec that didn't exist. I'd done that a lot. It's most of what I've ever done. He hired me on the spot, and I've liked that answer too much ever since, which is usually the tell.
Months later they wanted to fire a developer. Too slow. By the numbers he was. I sat with him and read his work and the numbers turned over: he rewrote everything he touched because he couldn't leave bad code standing. He wasn't slow. He was in the wrong seat. We moved him to QA, where being unable to tolerate a flaw is the whole job. He was good at it.
Here's the part that kept me at the table this morning. Nobody advertises for the thing that got me hired. There's no line item for it, no rate card, so I've spent twenty years being paid for the job next to it. I read that man in an hour because I had the same problem and never noticed.
Every spec is incomplete. Every seat is cut for someone else. Some of us just make peace with it faster.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson