341–350 of 768 posts
> 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…
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This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…
This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.
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This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software. The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with soft…
I also consider myself a fairly good pragmatic software engineer. I have led small (3 engineers), medium (15), and large (100+) teams. To me, the best time was late 90s, early 2000s. We had a lot of autonomy. People would just trusted that we knew what and how to build it. I could focus on building a great product. Overtime, we lost control, to the point that we now work based on jira tickets made by managers or prod…
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> Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited! The term for that is "10x AI engineer." Anyone who has anything negative to say about such people is just jealous of their insane pro…
The supposed “10x engineer” may simply be someone stealing productivity from everyone around them. You measure the output of one person while ignoring the cost they impose on their team. If I generate 10 PRs in a day but three engineers now have to spend the next two days reviewing them, figuring out what I changed, correcting bad assumptions, debugging regressions and explaining why half of it needs to be redone, I…
Taken how some companies award promotions and bonus this is actually a double win. You not only improve your own numbers but also make this of your competition worse! /s
> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you. I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time. Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something els…
the vpn is called dev-test-prod and some containers are stored in a dev subscription, but still used in production. Some intangible network error forces you to use the production cluster for testing (the bucket is at least called test).
I feel this kind of setup is invariant everywhere I go to do engineering. Fable level intelligence has no effect!
> 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…
Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features. But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. Maybe…
Writing code was never the job. Creating value was the job -- coding was just how to implement that goal.
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If your company has bad engineers cranking out 10,000 line PRs your engineering culture and product was already bad, I guarantee it.
It's not the whole culture and product, it's specific teams that do it. And trying to push back on teams that are "producing" is not a simple task.
> 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…
This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…
You should have plenty of data to review regularly and push back on any teams that are causing problems. That's a process problem and you need a process for it.
Trace the increase back to specific deployments, call out those teams, and make them fix their shit.
Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles