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Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

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Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#41

Post by tripledry »

pverheggen wrote: post #36

OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change. Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these thin…

Side note, this is why I'm not that worried even if AI becomes even better at writing code. The only times I've spent "too long" on features, are times where I basically had an empty ticket. I need to find the right people to talk with, figure out requirements, iterate on changing requirements etc.

That's only marginally sped up even if you could generate the code with a click of a button.

This was somehow related to the "social activity" part :D

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#42

Post by gaigalas »

glitchc wrote: post #21
gaigalas wrote: post #4

The world is a big place with all kinds of organizations and people that fit in different ways on those organizations. Some organizations do in fact optimize for correctedness , and some people are good at it. Some people are good in everything (totally possible, universe doesn't care about keeping dichotomies). Maybe that technical guy was only technical up until now because it was what added more value. People ofte…

Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.

Look at what they do instead, not their marketing. NASA is the obvious and biggest example. They won't be vibe coding and skipping QA any time soon. Probably ever.

Look at any high quality open source software, and the care people put into them. Those are organizations, made up of people, some of them highly technical.

Startups often don't optimize for correctedness. They can't afford it. But that's a niche. Funny enough, it's the one that's being most affected by the shift in value dynamics right now, so I understand that some people here might see the world as just this, but it isn't.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#43

Post by elevatortrim »

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #24

That is why I think technical excellent people should be in charge. They are the ones able to see the trade offs. They can see who is actually doing great work. Think Linus, Guido, Larry Wall, or Carmack.

Correct, but it becomes very hard to be in charge and stay technically excellent. The higher you are, the harder it is.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#44

Post by Rapzid »

mmsc wrote: post #40
james_marks wrote: post #18

I find OP's communication style abrasive and off-putting, which tracks with them saying they've been coached on this, and found that advice lacking. Maybe it's still insufficient advice, but it hasn't worked for them at least in part because they haven't figured out how to apply it. From the post, I see low empathy and an air of superiority, (perhaps earned by genuinely being smarter than their peers-- doesn't make i…

That's because it was generated by an LLM.

I simply cannot believe people in this post are discussing this as anything other than a complete bot job. Pure clanker vomit.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#46

Post by avazhi »

pverheggen wrote: post #36

OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change. Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these thin…

There is no OP. It’s ai slop.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#47

Post by sgarland »

glitchc wrote: post #21
gaigalas wrote: post #4

The world is a big place with all kinds of organizations and people that fit in different ways on those organizations. Some organizations do in fact optimize for correctedness , and some people are good at it. Some people are good in everything (totally possible, universe doesn't care about keeping dichotomies). Maybe that technical guy was only technical up until now because it was what added more value. People ofte…

Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.

IME, here are some signals that a company actually values correctness. This is not all-inclusive, nor is any one of them a guarantee.

* Their codebase is written in something relatively obscure, like Elixir or Haskell.

* They're an infrastructure [0] or monitoring provider.

* They're running their code on VMs, and have a sane instantiation and deployment process.

* They use Foreign Key Constraints in their RDBMS, and can explain and defend their chosen normalization level.

* They're running their own servers in a colo or self-owned datacenter.

And here are some anti-signals. Same disclaimers apply.

* Their backend is written in JS / TS (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Python [1]).

* They're running on K8s with a bunch of CRDs.

* They've posted blog articles about how they solved problems that the industry solved 20 years ago.

* They exclusively or nearly exclusively use NoSQL [2].

0: This is hit or miss; reference the steady decline in uptime from AWS, GitHub, et al.

1: I love Python dearly, and while it can be made excellent, it's a lot easier to make it bad.

2: Modulo places that have a clear need for something like Scylla - use the the right tool for the job, but the right tool is almost never a DocumentDB.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#49

Post by miningape »

sgarland wrote: post #30
jonstewart wrote: post #16

It’s a trust issue. There’s no one more of a PITA than a new team member who joins and starts questioning every little thing and demanding it be changed (the initial questioning is fine, so long as you accept “because” as a reason). OF COURSE any team that’s shipping software will have things that don’t make sense prima facie, because they’re accumulated tech debt or historical accident. Go beyond identifying all the…

> Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue. TFA author (and me), and you have wildly different motivations. I don't know the author, but have said verbatim much of what they wrote, so I feel like I can speak on this. Beyond the fact that I recognize the company has to contin…

Don't really have anything to add but I do want to say you're not alone - I feel very similarly about AI tooling, the level of satisfaction I get from using them (none), the need for interesting technical challenges, etc. etc.

Re: Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

#50

Post by wiseowise »

pverheggen wrote: post #36

OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change. Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these thin…

Where did they dismiss soft skills? The point is that every improvement is met with "just get better soft skills bro" dismissal, which in reality has nothing to do with soft skills. I've met this firsthand.
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