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- Hacker News
- It's funny, I've been literally trying to convey these exact sentiments to my team over the last few days down to the:
Pretty much word for word.> Need to build a whole new feature to test it? Have you tried putting a button in the existing UI and seeing if people click it?It feels like engineers are collectively feeling the pain now that product has decided that engagement of mental faculties is no longer necessary on their behalf; just build it and figure out the user persona and utility later...if ever. What used to be a process of taking the time to understand the domain, the user, and how the product fits into some process has been tossed out the window; just ship whatever we think some imaginary user wants and experiment until we succeed.
It creates the exact problem that OP talks about: every random feature that gets vibe-coded becomes a source of instability and risk; something that can then only be maintained via more vibe coding because no one has a working mental model of the thing.
- A really competent senior figures out what the prevailing culture of the company is now, and what it will need to be in 5 years, and adapts as they go. Startups with 5 people maybe don't need extra complexity costing runway. A 500 person business may need that complexity because now there are second-order effects that need to be mitigated for every business decision. It's not a black-and-white "always avoid complexity" it's "add complexity when it makes sense" and even that question has a lot of nuance because sometimes the business just needs to survive for another couple of months.
- This misses the basic problem of incentives. What "the company" wants doesn't matter, it's what the people making particular decisions want.
There exist people who's jobs depend entirely on rolling out new features, or apps of some sort, and having them show up in some form of company metric. If the senior developers says it's a bad idea, those people won't listen, or won't care. Their job is on the line.
by nitwit005 - > They want to avoid development as much as they can.
One of my favorite .sigs was:
I don't remember where I saw it, but it was a while ago. It's possible the author has an HN account.I hate code, and want as little of it as possible in my software.One of the things that happens to "avoiders," is that they get attacked for being "negative." It can get career-ending, when the management chain is the "Move fast and break things" type.
I just stopped offering suggestions, after encountering that crap a few times, and learned to just quietly make preparations for when the wheels fall off.
I have spent my entire adult life, shipping, and shipping means lots of "not-shiny," boring stuff. But it gets onto shelves, and into end-users' hands. I was originally trained in hardware development, where mistakes can't be fixed with an OTA update. It taught me to "play the tape through," and make sure that I do a good job on every part of the project; which includes a lot of anticipating problems, and designing mitigations and prevention.
- What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise.
So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to share it with.
by nullorempty - Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production.
A rewrite?
I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.
The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, scale, not cost more to run than we sell it for.
The loop on the right. There are companies, two of them are very popular these days, they took it to an extreme. You ship something fast, and since it only scales linearly you go raise money. Successful companies, countless users, some of them even pay. Who's to blame? The senior developer, or simply someone reasonable who asks, how's that sustainable, what's the way out of this? Those are fired, so whoever's left is a believer.
by hirako2000 - As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by
> “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?”
as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out new things would be different than a CRUD SaaS with 100 clients in a field that could benefit from a fresh perspective.
There are definitely ways to have eager/very open seniors drive systems into hard to get out corners. But then there are people that claim PHP5 is all you need.
by lnenad - Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it.
An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to another is based on this belief. And because this belief is wrong, the attempt to communicate expertise never fully succeeds.
Factual knowledge can be transferred via words well, that's why there is always at least partial success at communicating expertise. But solidified interconnected world model of what all your knowledge adds up to, cannot. AI can blow you out of the water at knowing more facts, but it doesn't yet utilize it in a way that allows surprisingly often having surprisingly correct insights into what more knowledge probably is. That mysterious ability to be right more often is coming out of "world model", that is what "expertise" is. That part cannot be communicated, one can only help others acquire the same expertise.
Communicating expertise is a hint where to go and what to learn, the reader still needs to put effort to internalize it and they need to have the right project that provides the opportunity to learn what needs to be learnt. It is not an act of transfer.
by hamstergene