5 ms·
The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do th
by _pdp_ 7mo ago
The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.
The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to vibe coders. These are people who have not written a single line of code themselves and have not worked on any system at scale, yet believe that coding is somehow magically "solved" due to LLMs.
Writing the actual code itself (fully or partially) maybe yes. But understanding the complexity of the system and working with organisational structures that support it is a completely different ball game.
- okanat 7mo ago> Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator. I was thinking like this for a while but, now, I think this expectation is majorly false for a senior individual contributor. Especially when someone who can push out a detailed series of blogposts and has tried step-wise escalation. Communication is a two-way street. Unlike the individual contributors, the management is responsible for listening and responding to risk assesments by the senior members and also ensuring that the technical competence and experienced people are retained in a tech company. If a leader doesn't want to keep an open ear, they do not belong there. If there is a huge attrition of highly senior people from non-finalized projects, you do not belong leadership either. Both cases are mentioned in the article. Unfortunately our socioeconomic and political culture in the West has increasingly removed responsibilities and liabilities from the leadership of the companies. This causes people with lackluster technical, communication and risk assesment mentality being promoted into leadership positions. So outside of a couple completely privately owned companies or exceptionally well organized NGOs, it will be increasingly difficult to find good leaders.
- grensley 7mo agoAbsolutely textbook "Brilliant Jerk". Dude just whines and whines and whines. If you're so good, why can't you get anybody to work with you?
- dh2022 7mo agoI did not get that impression at all. He mentioned quite a few conversations with partner level employees, technical fellow, principal managers. The impression I got is he tried to fix things, but the mess is so widespread and decision makers are so comfortable in this mess that nobody wants to stick their necks out and fix things. I got strong NASA Challenger vibes when reading this story…
- lokar 7mo agoMy read is he was not Sr enough in the org to drive any effort to improve things, and could not get someone who was to do it either.
- ActorNightly 7mo agoEven before vide coding this problem existed. The truth is, only small companies build good stuff. Once a company becomes big enough, the main product that it originally started on is the only good thing that is worth buying from them - all new ventures are bound to be shit, because you are never going to convince people to break out of status quo work patterns that work for the rest of the company. The only exception to this has been Google, which seems to isolate the individual sectors a lot more and let them have more autonomy, with less focus on revenue.
- AmVess 7mo agoOP was not successful because they didn't want to fix the problems he discussed. I have been in the same exact situation, and no level of communication skills would have been successful in changing their minds.
- gtowey 7mo agoI disagree. I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that. After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They don't care about their users, their employees, they don't care about the long term health of the company. None of it. Engineers who do care will burn out trying to "do their job" in the face of management that doesn't care. It's getting worse in the tech industry. We've reached the stage where leaders are in it only for themselves. The company is just the vehicle. Calls for quality fall on deaf ears these days.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hunterpayne 7mo agoThis will explain it too you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&list=PLInW-j_OdlMwUHWuDdlUFiqhN4m0KI1NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&list=PLInW-j_Odl...
- pas 7mo agoyes, so situational awareness is even more fundamental than communication especially because people hired by people hired by people (....) hired by founders (or delegated by some board that's voted by successful business people) did not get there by being engineering minded. and this is inconceivable for most engineering minded people! they don't care because their world, their life, their problems and their solutions are completely devoid of that mindset. some very convincing founder types try to imitate it, some dropouts who spent a few years around people who have this mindset can also imitate it for a while, but their for them it's just a thing like the government, history, or geography, it's just there, if there's a hill they just go around, they don't want to understand why it's there, what's there, what's under it, what geological processes formed it, why, how, how long it will be there ...
- phillipcarter 7mo agoYeah, uhh: > I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. That's because the skills weren't good enough.