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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#241

Post by gib444 »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #99
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

It's 100% denial/ego. I've been a contractor longer than I'd like and it's the exact same response I see when I join a new team. The team complains they have too much work and can't get anything done, so their manager pulls me in. Suddenly, they don't want to give anything up. I'm actually in the middle of this right now. The team "is swamped" yet somehow, they are able to argue that almost everything I can handle is…

This sounds like my ideal job. How do you land such gigs?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#242

Post by jwoq9118 »

auggierose wrote: post #128

I cringe every time I read the word "load-bearing" in an article.

It instantly made me think this was either written by AI or heavily edited, and I hadn't gotten that sense until the moment I saw load-bearing.

I hate that em dashes have been killed by AI as well. Hundreds of years ago Charles Dickens was using them in his novels and today someone will read his books and in ignorance actually think AI wrote it.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#245

Post by BurningFrog »

ftmootnomoat wrote: post #26
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

This is a false dichotomy. Software development has always been about keeping people in agreement, from the customer to the coder, and all the people in between (the fewer the better). Meetings that increases sync between customer and coder are few and precious. In large organisations ceremonial meetings proliferate for the wrong reasons. People like to insert themselves in the process between customer and coder to a…

The solution is to work at small companies/startups.

That comes with real tradeoffs, but I've never regretted that path.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#247

Post by leptons »

jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

And now they're almost forcing us to produce machine-made tech-debt at an industrial scale. The AI craze isn't going to produce the boon some people think it will. And the solution? More AI, unfortunately.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#248

Post by pdimitar »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

That's a straw man at the root of which sits a conflation of at least two types of meetings:

(A)

Meetings where we discuss whether naming two users in an integration test `u1` and `u2` vs. `user1` and `user2` and whether whoever did the former is so hopeless that they should drop all computer work and go work on a farm, and spend an hour of meaningless and meandering style preferences.

(B)

Higher-level meetings where I can communicate with PMs and customers and CEOs almost on their level f.ex. "Does it make sense for us to have primary/co-borrower roles in our credit products or are all sides equally liable?".

---

With the advent of really good LLMs, meetings of Type A are nearly gone and meetings of Type B have increased meaningfully. I am very happy with that new state of affairs. Are you not?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#249

Post by awkward »

Jensson wrote: post #162
wuliwong wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Goomba is distinct. Strawman is disingenuously representing an argument, Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app.

> Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app. Its because it comes from the same political faction. In general people are open about A when A seems palatable, and openly B when B seems palatable, but they almost never admit to do that when its obviously wrong to do so. That is the rational part of the fallacy, even if these are diff…

This is just the fallacy. Political groups are coalitions not single monoliths.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#250

Post by BurningFrog »

ajkjk wrote: post #191
jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

yes, most places I have worked were hobbled by the organizations being completely idiotic. which is why engineers want to be left alone to code, historically. Better to be left alone than dealing with insane bureaucracy. But even better than that is working with good bureaucracy. Just, once you know it's insane, there's not really anything that you can personally do about it, so you check out and try to hold onto a s…

> there's not really anything that you can personally do about it

Small companies/startups don't have insane bureaucracy, and they're hiring.

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