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CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

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Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#41

Post by luckylion »

abroszka33 wrote: post #20

They should think about what happens when expectations are so high that a single dev must deliver and maintain multiple products. What stops that single dev from leaving and offering the same product on his own.

Moats for software/web companies that are entirely "we've built it, it would be too expensive for you to replicate it" are getting much weaker. It's now quick to produce something that at least looks close to an existing product. You can't clone the backend, the know-how to handle some weird interactions etc, but still, you can get fairly far mimicking the frontend, and LLMs can write you the fancy marketing buzzwords too.

I think the part you can't easily clone will turn out to be the institutional processes that allow you to run at scale, onboard new people, deal with common requests that AI cannot on its own (e.g. legal compliance), the relationships you have with partners and vendors, the legal setups you have in place etc.

I'd assume that plenty of developers feel capable to building a better jira, and some try, and few/none succeed despite atlassian doing everything in their power to drive clients away, because cloning the project isn't the hard part with that type of product.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#42

Post by gib444 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #21
helge9210 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CTOs noticed it. When product pipeline is empty, because engineers finished all the outstanding tasks, the engineers are awarded with more work: "The new software engineer is a product leader. Someone thinking about what the product is, not just how it works", or, in other words, engineers are going to be tasked with putting more content "the what" into the product pipeline.

It has been my experience that nobody wants to hear the software engineer's opinion as to what will improve the product however.

Yup. This was a very useful precursor to the AI era: telling engineers they're worthless and they are there just to implement the specifications and ideas drawn up by more important people. Shutting them out of the earlier discussions and only informing of the project way down the road

Now they're just trying to reduce us to idiots shovelling coal (specs) into the furnace (LLMs)

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#45

Post by helge9210 »

olsondv wrote: post #29
helge9210 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CTOs noticed it. When product pipeline is empty, because engineers finished all the outstanding tasks, the engineers are awarded with more work: "The new software engineer is a product leader. Someone thinking about what the product is, not just how it works", or, in other words, engineers are going to be tasked with putting more content "the what" into the product pipeline.

Has that not been what a senior SWE is? You’re making it sound like engineers need to be asked to implement features rather than contribute to design. At my company, if you are not coming up with new features or applications, your days are numbered.

Depends on the organization and on the SWEs. I do share your understanding, which is making me unfit for organizations, where the authority over "what" is firmly held by POs and the whole vertical on top of them.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#47

Post by cucumber3732842 »

helge9210 wrote: post #11
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #6

What CTOs did not notice yet is that cheap code exposes inefficiencies elsewhere. Migrating Spring Boot apps from 3.x t 4.x is now easy given all the tooling available. But the administrative load can't be reduced by faster code delivery and that's the new bottleneck.

CTOs noticed it. When product pipeline is empty, because engineers finished all the outstanding tasks, the engineers are awarded with more work: "The new software engineer is a product leader. Someone thinking about what the product is, not just how it works", or, in other words, engineers are going to be tasked with putting more content "the what" into the product pipeline.

Your average mid to senior SWE is too far from the actual use of the product to actually do that well though.

There are some smaller businesses and selectively structured ones where that's not the case but for the most part organizations keep engineers from interacting with the customers enough to really know what the customers need and want.

There are some cases where a savvy engineer can say "well if I unify X then it'll be trivial to make Y self service and that'll make redundant an entire category of support tickets" or "we've been getting a lot of requests for X, maybe Y should be extensible so that those can be trivially accommodated" but by and large engineering teams are not positioned to have the knowledge to identify these things. And this is mostly an intentional organizational architecture decision.

Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

#50

Post by PLenz »

gmerc wrote: post #5
badgersnake wrote: post #3

CTOs / CEOs have demonstrated how completely useless they are pretty much across the board over the last few years. Groupthink and bandwagons, zero innovation or use of brain.

CTOs were told that the companies shares will be sold off if they can't produce AI results, and that the CEO will be deposed for "not having an AI strategy", so they should kindly shut up and go along with the flow.

Between companies we have competition and capitalism. Within companies we have command economies at best and absolute monarchies at worst
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