You're going to get a lot of "yes" responses to your questions that themselves are going to be embellishments (or outright lies), omit context, pretend that refactoring an existing set of code is the same as writing it from scratch under the same conditions, etc.
Our industry is filled with people who are "cowboy programmers" and think of themselves as Charlie when in reality they're more like Alan, and are attributing what is actually pure luck and circumstance to their own brilliance. There's an especially high concentration of this BS on HN. You only need review the HN threads about the HealthCare.gov website to see this in action.
That's not to say this sort of scenario doesn't exist, never occurs, etc. It's just that there is likely to be an extraordinarily high number of people who read HN who believe they have experienced it (on either side), even if an objective evaluation of the circumstances would reveal they haven't.
Our industry is filled with people who are "cowboy programmers" and think of themselves as Charlie when in reality they're more like Alan, and are attributing what is actually pure luck and circumstance to their own brilliance. There's an especially high concentration of this BS on HN. You only need review the HN threads about the HealthCare.gov website to see this in action.
That's not to say this sort of scenario doesn't exist, never occurs, etc. It's just that there is likely to be an extraordinarily high number of people who read HN who believe they have experienced it (on either side), even if an objective evaluation of the circumstances would reveal they haven't.