A really competent senior figures out what the prevailing culture of the company is now, and what it will need to be in 5 years, and adapts as they go. Startups with 5 people maybe don't need extra complexity costing runway. A 500 person business may need that complexity because now there are second-order effects that need to be mitigated for every business decision. It's not a black-and-white "always avoid complexity" it's "add complexity when it makes sense" and even that question has a lot of nuance because sometimes the business just needs to survive for another couple of months.
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
11–20 of 361 posts
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#12FTA: “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.”
Almost all business presidents, CEOs, and owners are thinking this. I guarantee you they are sick and tired of developers taking forever on every project. Now they can create the apps themselves.
My comment isn't meant to debate every nitty-gritty detail about code quality, security, stability, thinking of every aspect of how the code works, does it scale, etc. All of those things are extremely important. However, most leadership never cared about any of that anyways. They only heard those as excuses why developers took so long. Over the last decade they put up with it begrudgingly.
You know all the developers that wanted to complain about IT, cybersecurity, DevOPs, cloud architects for getting in their way and if they only had administrator access then they could get everything done themselves because they are experts in networking and everything else? Well, those developers are about to have the worst day ever when every single person on the planet can generate code and will be "experts" in everything as well.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#13I 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.
Let’s do the exact opposite of what this person is saying. Resist AI slop.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#14I 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.
There's no fundamental reason that I have to read random blogposts from people I don't know. I do it today because I find it to be an enjoyable way to learn more about my profession and explore various perspectives on it. If I stop finding it enjoyable because too many people write their posts with AI, I'll stop reading these kind of blogs altogether, in the same way that I (and I suspect many commenters here) do not read even the most lovingly crafted Linkedin posts.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#15I 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’m inclined to take the author at their word that they’re a copywriter by trade.
I agree that the punchy staccato and the rhetorical questions smell AI-ish, but the way this person uses them, there’s, like, a payload each time. Versus LLM-speak, where the assertions are at best banal and more frequently just confusing.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#16> Ah, well, it can’t yet do the one thing senior developers still do. Take responsibility.
If only higher-ups would recognize that. Instead we see left and right mass layoffs, restructurings and clueless higher-ups who clearly drank not just a bottle of koolaid but a barrel.
> The ‘Speed’ version allows the rest of the business to continue learning from the market, as the senior developers build a trailing version of the system that’s well-reviewed and understandable.
Yeah... that doesn't fly. The beancounters don't care. The "speed" version works, so why even invest a single cent into the "scale" version? That's all potential profit that can be distributed to shareholders. And when it (inevitably) all crashes down, the higher ups all have long since cashed out, leaving the remaining shareholders as bagholders, the employees without employment and society to pick up the tab. Yet again.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#17I 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.
You have to be able to distinguish the scent of LLMs from the scent of Gary Halbert.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#18> The avoider, the reducer, the recycler.
As this kind of person, it can be alienating in some teams / companies.
What I've found works best is to convey how the added complexity will affect non-engineers. You have to understand the incentives and trade offs though, and sometimes it's better to take the loss.
If you have the fortune of sticking around with the same leaders for awhile, a few rounds of being vocal, but compromising, will work in your favor. When that complexity comes back around to bite them in the way you described, you will earn some trust.
In my experience the solution proposed will rarely result in a less complex solution. Quick MVPs have the tendency to stick around. As soon as a customer starts using some product or feature, the cost of pivoting goes up. If you wish to experiment, do it on a segment.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#19I 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.
Also the consumption of AI-generated text could be having an influence on the tone of how people write.
So even if AI was not used to write an article, it could "smell" like AI to someone who consumes less of it.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#20FTA: “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.” Almost all business presidents, CEOs, and owners are thinking this. I guarantee you they are sick and tired of developers taking forever on every project. Now they can create the apps themselves. My comment isn't meant to debate every nitty-gritty detail about code quality, security, stab…
> Well, those developers are about to have the worst day ever when every single person on the planet can generate code and will be "experts" in everything as well.
And society is beginning to suffer from it. AWS alone managed to slop itself into outages twice in a matter of a year [1] (and I bet that's just the stuff that escalates into mass-visible outages, not the "oh, can't start a new EC2 instance of a specific type for a few hours" kind), and a lot of companies were affected.
It's always the same game: by the time the consequences of the beancounters' actions come home to roost, they have long since departed with nice bonus packages, leaving the rest to dig out the mess.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cl...