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I don't know, the more I advance in my career, the more I see it as the opposite. Wide eyed developers with big designs, who are obsessed with the technical asp

I don't know, the more I advance in my career, the more I see it as the opposite. Wide eyed developers with big designs, who are obsessed with the technical aspects of a solution, who disregard the practicalities, long term implications at the social level (who is going to maintain this, do we have people that have that skillset, is this worth the effort, does it really matter to be this elegant, or is it more important to ship quickly and economically) come off as a bit immature and the more effective engineers who understand these priorities are given more respect and authority.

stuckinhell 3y ago
The problem for a lot of the social level issues is that it is pure pure politics.
gopalv 3y ago
> the more effective engineers who understand these priorities are given more respect and authority. The problem with "given more authority" I see is that management plucks these engineers out to make their day job basically "sit in meetings" if you're even slightly effective at simplifying life for everyone else. Because that is the place of most leverage to place those people, but then those people are in a constant tug-of-war with the first group of "fresh ideas". Eventually, the people who are in charge of the "prevention of bad architecture" become the bad guys because they (or me, I'm projecting) get jaded into just finding out what's wrong with something as fast as possible to be able to keep up with that workload. You go from a creative role to a fundamentally sieve role with destructive tendencies, where you are filtering out the good from the bad as fast as possible, be. First of all, not all new ideas are bad and "there's something bad about X" is not a "let's not do X". Secondly, going from making things to shooting down things is intellectual suffering if you have a bit of empathy. Some people on the "committee" with you don't have empathy & literally enjoy it - you're either trying to damage control on a case-by-case or building a "these assholes need to be fired" doc out of the meetings. I realized what I would become if I conflated authority and respect ("respect my authoritah!"). Quitting was really the only way out of it. But it wasn't hard to explain to my spouse that i needed to leave for a job a level down and which paid half as much, because she could see me bringing my "why the hell do we have to do this" attitude home & to family decisions.
tacitusarc 3y ago
As a team lead, I’ve found it really difficult to keep curious, smart, young engineers on track. Everyone wants to go off and build shiny things instead of solving real problems. I have to find enough shiny problems that actually need solving to balance out the daily grind. Interestingly, I also find it difficult to instill a sense of meticulousness, and how important it is to write code in a way that reduces bugs. Clever engineers come up with clever, complicated solutions that are written quickly and rely on coincidence to function. Life experience is the best teacher for this, but I often need to step in. I’m still not sure what the balance is there.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > I’ve found it really difficult to keep curious, smart, young engineers on track I’ve found the opposite. The young engineers are generally willing to listen to reason. The older Enterprise Architects are the ones that want to keep making things more complicated, or want to keep using suboptimal solutions because we’ve been using them for years. Now that I write it down it’s kind of curious how on one hand it’s complicating things with stuff they already know, and on the other hand it’s absolute rejection of stuff they don’t. Maybe I’m the same?

stuckinhell 3y ago

The problem for a lot of the social level issues is that it is pure pure politics.

gopalv 3y ago

> the more effective engineers who understand these priorities are given more respect and authority. The problem with "given more authority" I see is that management plucks these engineers out to make their day job basically "sit in meetings" if you're even slightly effective at simplifying life for everyone else. Because that is the place of most leverage to place those people, but then those people are in a constant tug-of-war with the first group of "fresh ideas". Eventually, the people who are in charge of the "prevention of bad architecture" become the bad guys because they (or me, I'm projecting) get jaded into just finding out what's wrong with something as fast as possible to be able to keep up with that workload. You go from a creative role to a fundamentally sieve role with destructive tendencies, where you are filtering out the good from the bad as fast as possible, be. First of all, not all new ideas are bad and "there's something bad about X" is not a "let's not do X". Secondly, going from making things to shooting down things is intellectual suffering if you have a bit of empathy. Some people on the "committee" with you don't have empathy & literally enjoy it - you're either trying to damage control on a case-by-case or building a "these assholes need to be fired" doc out of the meetings. I realized what I would become if I conflated authority and respect ("respect my authoritah!"). Quitting was really the only way out of it. But it wasn't hard to explain to my spouse that i needed to leave for a job a level down and which paid half as much, because she could see me bringing my "why the hell do we have to do this" attitude home & to family decisions.

tacitusarc 3y ago

As a team lead, I’ve found it really difficult to keep curious, smart, young engineers on track. Everyone wants to go off and build shiny things instead of solving real problems. I have to find enough shiny problems that actually need solving to balance out the daily grind. Interestingly, I also find it difficult to instill a sense of meticulousness, and how important it is to write code in a way that reduces bugs. Clever engineers come up with clever, complicated solutions that are written quickly and rely on coincidence to function. Life experience is the best teacher for this, but I often need to step in. I’m still not sure what the balance is there.

Aeolun 3y ago
> I’ve found it really difficult to keep curious, smart, young engineers on track I’ve found the opposite. The young engineers are generally willing to listen to reason. The older Enterprise Architects are the ones that want to keep making things more complicated, or want to keep using suboptimal solutions because we’ve been using them for years. Now that I write it down it’s kind of curious how on one hand it’s complicating things with stuff they already know, and on the other hand it’s absolute rejection of stuff they don’t. Maybe I’m the same?