Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
1–10 of 361 posts
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#2[deleted]
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#3I don't necessarily disagree with this conclusion, but the way it is written has a lot of AI prose smell that was extremely distracting for me.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#4As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by
> “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?”
as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out new things would be different than a CRUD SaaS with 100 clients in a field that could benefit from a fresh perspective.
There are definitely ways to have eager/very open seniors drive systems into hard to get out corners. But then there are people that claim PHP5 is all you need.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#5[deleted]
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#6I don't necessarily disagree with this conclusion, but the way it is written has a lot of AI prose smell that was extremely distracting for me.
I didn't get the AI vibe from it. At some point we are just going to have to get use to most stuff being written to some degree by AI.
There will be different shades of usage and maybe we draw a line somewhere in there.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#7I agree with the author's premise - that one feedback loop optimizes for speed, and the other for scale - but I don't think the market is bearing the conclusion - that AI should be utilized to enable more rapid experimentation, where we better scale what works.
Many vendors seem to be learning (or not learning, but just throwing their weight against it anyway) that adding hastily-generated AI features are causing customer dissatisfaction, as more people brand the features "slop".
In the best case, the users give the company more chances. Infinitely more chances.
In a worse case, the users assume the new feature will always be bad, given their first impression. It's hard for a vendor to make people reconsider a first impression.
The absolute worst case is that AI enables a new market, but the first attempts are so poor that the first movers make people write that market off as a dead end, leading to a lost opportunity.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#8Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production.
A rewrite?
I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.
The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, scale, not cost more to run than we sell it for.
The loop on the right. There are companies, two of them are very popular these days, they took it to an extreme. You ship something fast, and since it only scales linearly you go raise money. Successful companies, countless users, some of them even pay. Who's to blame? The senior developer, or simply someone reasonable who asks, how's that sustainable, what's the way out of this? Those are fired, so whoever's left is a believer.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#9As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…
A sort of survivor bias. A VP ordered to use elastic search, because it worked well at his company before. Turned out it worked well for us. Listen to the VP to make technical decisions. And use elastic search.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#10I don't necessarily disagree with this conclusion, but the way it is written has a lot of AI prose smell that was extremely distracting for me.
I didn't get the AI vibe from it. At some point we are just going to have to get use to most stuff being written to some degree by AI. There will be different shades of usage and maybe we draw a line somewhere in there.
The written word is how people interact with LLMs. Clarity and precision in writing results in more effective prompting of LLMs. It is just as possible that leaning heavily AI writing will be seen as a marker of not being natively skilled enough at writing to prompt LLMs effectively because of the GIGO principle.