15 hours ago
- The common claim that 'taste' is the ultimate differentiator in the AI era is misleading because taste actually refers to experience built from pattern recognition over years of work.
- Calling it 'taste' instead of 'experience' makes a learnable skill seem like an innate gift, which can demoralize junior developers who haven't had the same years of practice.
- True 'taste' in fields like engineering management comes from pattern recognition gained through repeated exposure to real situations, such as difficult conversations, code reviews, and production incidents.
- A junior developer hearing 'taste matters' may feel hopeless, but the message should be 'you need reps'—showing up and doing the work repeatedly until the skill becomes instinctive.
- Experience, not innate taste, is what enables senior engineers to spot problems intuitively; this ability develops over hundreds of ambiguous situations that gradually become easier to navigate.