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The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

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Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#61

Post by gherkinnn »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #44
BinRoo wrote: post #8

Beautiful write-up, thank you. One aspect that still bothers me is that you claim the just-say-no-engineer "was a critical role during ZIRP." I might be in the minority here, but I don't hold that same stance. I wonder if I am alone in that?

I think the "just say no" engineers were massively sidelined during ZIRP Actually I suspect they are just massively sidelined in software in general because of how few regulations exist The "just say no" engineer is someone who thrives in regulated environments, because (enforced) regulations are the only things that actually slow down the growth at all costs minded PMs in the world. And even then only sometimes

I think that's it. LLMs infected companies with the Rage Virus and now they're running mindlessly at anything that moves. A "just say no" engineer has no air in such an environment. It is FOMO of the most diffuse kind, with absolutely nobody knowing what the what is we're missing, but everybody (and that includes myself) knows something is going to change.

We like to dress up in suits, but we're all apes afraid of shapes in the clouds.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#62

Post by pram »

I've seen the "just say no" thing institutionalized through SRE, where they can use the "banhammer" to stop the deployment of new features or whatever hasn't passed their various "reliability checklists" and such (if they're responsible for on-call)

I'm sure this won't be popular but a lot of "SRE" teams were definitely ZIRP phenomenon, heh.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#63

Post by simianwords »

simianwords wrote: post #52

Ohhh man wait I have so much to say about the “just say no” engineer. The "just say no" phenotype of engineers believe these things generally (from my experience) - thinks cloud is a psyop by the big tech people to fool companies into being locked in - thinks everything companies do is to fool the stock market and prop up stocks - thinks tech ecosystem was at its peak during their time and ever since then it has beco…

They also believe Kubernetes as introduced in their company because of Resume Driven Development. Microservices are also a part of Resume Driven Development to prop up Hashicorp stocks.

They strongly despise NoSQL and think a single MySQL instance is totally okay for their multi billion dollar company with 100k reads and 1k writes per second and NoSQL was a pushed by Big Cloud TM.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#65

Post by andwur »

eru wrote: post #49
shermantanktop wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many stories of FAANG hiring during that era for the purpose of denying talent to competitors. But now that you hired them, what will they do? And how will you keep them from creating problems? It sounds cynical in retrospect; at the time the same set of facts were explained differently, in a way that didn’t hurt people feelings.

That's a bit silly. Presumably you wanted to deny competitors use of these engineers, because they would build something useful. Just have them build that stuff for you instead? And if competitors were in the same boat, why bother hiring these people at all?

It's about denial of labour leading to denial of broader competition, rather than a true intent to build a competing product. If you were actually to follow through with building the product you would need a lot more than just engineers to roll out a successful product, effectively an entire company is needed, which would spread the company focus out and the lead to investor questions about your focus and commitment. Then if it's an unproven idea there's significant risk in going to market etc etc.

Cheaper to just lock up the talent and burn the wages. Bit of a ding to your books, big ding to your competitor's capability.

In saying that, it's a terrible practice. Massive waste of time, opportunity, talent and money.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#66

Post by jeron »

pram wrote: post #62

I've seen the "just say no" thing institutionalized through SRE, where they can use the "banhammer" to stop the deployment of new features or whatever hasn't passed their various "reliability checklists" and such (if they're responsible for on-call) I'm sure this won't be popular but a lot of "SRE" teams were definitely ZIRP phenomenon, heh.

as someone on the other side who has had to deal with deploys that go from 5PM to 2AM due to bad code changes, and being on call with 40+ pages a day, there's a reason why SREs are just say no when they're the first responders to outages caused by poorly implemented features. I'm not saying just say no is the right mentality but I can see why many develop the cynical anti-change mentality

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#67

Post by simianwords »

frevib wrote: post #58

Code is a liability. Saying no is because the engineer wants to reduce complexity, not because she/ he is so subjectively “obsessed” with code quality. The term “quality” is nowadays misunderstood by management. It means the right amount of effort to build the product as fast and for as low as cost possible, taking into account a team of engineers that can easily add and modify code. This description is the better on…

[flagged]

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#69

Post by rozap »

valleyer wrote: post #53

> It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to. Holy cow. I worked at a big tech firm but left the industry prior to the emergence of InstructGPT et al., so I haven't experienced LLM code generation from the inside. Is this really h…

Yes, this is happening. A friend of mine was telling me about a 25k LoC PR that was submitted by a product manager that he had to content with. And the politics are real - you can't just be like "no", but it's pretty tough to meaningfully review a 25k line PR, let alone from someone who knows fuck all about what they're doing and can't answer questions you might have.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#70

Post by khuey »

pram wrote: post #62

I've seen the "just say no" thing institutionalized through SRE, where they can use the "banhammer" to stop the deployment of new features or whatever hasn't passed their various "reliability checklists" and such (if they're responsible for on-call) I'm sure this won't be popular but a lot of "SRE" teams were definitely ZIRP phenomenon, heh.

Would you want to be on call for someone else's garbage though? There's a very obvious and real tension here.
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