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If you work in a technical role and you _don't_ have the ability to break something, you're unlikely to be contributing in a significant way. Likely that would

by dolni 5y ago

If you work in a technical role and you _don't_ have the ability to break something, you're unlikely to be contributing in a significant way. Likely that would make you a junior developer whose every line of code is heavily scrutinized. Engineers should be experts and you should be able to trust them to make reasonable choices about the management of their projects. That doesn't mean there can't be some checks in place, and it doesn't mean that all engineers should be perfect. But you also have to acknowledge that adding all of those safeties has a cost. You can be a competent person who requires fewer safeties or less competent with more safeties. Which one provides more value to an organization?

pm90 5y ago
> Which one provides more value to an organization? Neither, they both provide the same value in the long term. Senior engineers cannot execute on everything they commit to without having a team of engineers they work with. If nobody trains junior engineers, the discipline would go extinct. Senior engineers provide value by building guardrails to enable junior engineers to provide value by delivering with more confidence.
fragmede 5y ago
The tactical point is to remove sharp edges, eg there's a tool that optionally take a region argument. network_cli remove_routes [--region us-east-1] Blaming the operator that they should have known that running network_cli remove_routes will take down all regions because the region wasn't specified is the kind of thing as to what's being called out here. All of the tools need to not default to breaking the world. That is the first and foremost thing being pushed. If an engineer is remotely afraid to come forwards (beyond self-shame/judgement) after an incident, and say "hey, I accidentally did this thing", then the situation will never get any better. That doesn't mean that engineers don't have the ability to break things, but it means it's harder (and very intentionally so) for a stressed out human operator to do the wrong thing by accident. Accidents happen. Do you just plan on never getting into a car accident, or do you wear a seat belt?

by dolni 5y ago

pm90 5y ago

> Which one provides more value to an organization? Neither, they both provide the same value in the long term. Senior engineers cannot execute on everything they commit to without having a team of engineers they work with. If nobody trains junior engineers, the discipline would go extinct. Senior engineers provide value by building guardrails to enable junior engineers to provide value by delivering with more confidence.

fragmede 5y ago

The tactical point is to remove sharp edges, eg there's a tool that optionally take a region argument. network_cli remove_routes [--region us-east-1] Blaming the operator that they should have known that running network_cli remove_routes will take down all regions because the region wasn't specified is the kind of thing as to what's being called out here. All of the tools need to not default to breaking the world. That is the first and foremost thing being pushed. If an engineer is remotely afraid to come forwards (beyond self-shame/judgement) after an incident, and say "hey, I accidentally did this thing", then the situation will never get any better. That doesn't mean that engineers don't have the ability to break things, but it means it's harder (and very intentionally so) for a stressed out human operator to do the wrong thing by accident. Accidents happen. Do you just plan on never getting into a car accident, or do you wear a seat belt?