101–110 of 816 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
have you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign
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The correct framing is "The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of people willing to work for less money,"
I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…
Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....
I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…
Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....
I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…
>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…
I would have said the same thing for the first 15 years of my career across several jobs and acquisitions.
Then I took a job at a company that fit this description. They had so many managers and PMs that every task was talked about, broken down, and documented so much that every Jira ticket was a little piece of work that a junior could handle by Googling things.
The quirk was that they had started hiring a lot of experienced and staff level engineers, too, but then tried to force this same framework on to everyone. We spent more time discussing tasks than doing them by a factor of 2-50X. There are some situations where this is appropriate, but none of our work was actually high scale or difficult. Your day might be spent writing design docs and collective sign offs as you worked through committees until the tickets at the end were so simple that any junior could do them.
It didn’t lead to better software. It was one big cargo cult game of performative management. A frequent outcome was that someone would get into the micromanaged tickets and realize there was a better way to handle something, but it wasn’t worth doing all of the fighting and meetings involved to do the meeting and Jira ticket dance all over again.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds. They get into a much deeper mess much faster.
We always talk about damage, what's the damage here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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>The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of brown people, The correct framing is "The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of people willing to work for less money,"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds. They get into a much deeper mess much faster.
We always talk about damage, what's the damage here?
I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…
Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....
I’m convinced the only reason there’s a Fortran crisis is because nobody wants to work on Fortran or make a career out of it.
Has nothing to do with willingness to hire juniors. Good luck finding promising juniors who survey their career opportunities and decide that Fortran is a good technology for building their resume.