I find prompt boxes without many example usages to be sort of a void on the usability side of things. People can feel stuck without some guidance.

I'd wager you're far better than whatever candidate they landed on, because the person who apparently qualified for that role probably isn't thinking while they prompt away.

Why are engineering teams looking for brainless monkeys? It's to their detriment all around if they aren't hiring capable people.

I wish I were this insufferable, alas.

Truthfully, I don't mind pairing on something if someone needs help and doesn't mind doing it asynchronously instead of sitting on a video call all day pointlessly when Slack will work just fine. :)

The reason I went to hyperbole with this one was because a prior startup I worked for required everyone to pair on every ticket, whether they liked it or not. I simply refused, and they were fine with it, because they liked the work I did. If I needed to collab on anything, I'd just talk to the other engineers. And guess what? We survived and did amazing work together as a team!

This idea that we need to be married to other co-workers throughout each day has all the same dysfunctional attributes as a nanny state or a daycare, where employees are treated as untrustworthy and needing to be monitored at all times.

The fact that talented engineers are able to contribute meaningfully, with few errors, and with brilliant solutions, all on their own, is proof enough that coding in solitude is a completely reasonable preference, that's shared among most of the engineers I've met in my career.

There's no reason to be so dogmatic about this.

This process respects each other's time and allows each person to visit the relevant pieces without interruption. The common rebuttal to this is "Slack messages are too interrupting!" and my response is: ignore the message until you're in a good spot to address it, or if you can't spend meaningful time on it yet, just reply with an "I'll check this out later, thanks!"

The idea that we have to sit on a video call in silence while losing the ability to think and write privately is such a huge distraction. Half of my mental bandwidth is occupied with self-consciousness of being "watched", or if I have my video off, it's the idea of being present and tied down by simply being there.

As someone with ADHD, those circumstances do not mix and eliminate any possibility of being productive because it's too distracting on all fronts. Not to mention, I need intense music to really get in a flow state. You might be surprised by how many engineers feel this way because they similarly experience neurodivergent realities around this.

When you have nothing to worry about, and you can create anything you want, at any expense, of course it's great.

For everyone else, we're dealing with teams who ship slop, company cultures that devalue workers right in front of their faces, and force them to worry about layoffs at any turn.

Outside of that, I have no reason not to be anonymous, and unfortunately it's too risky after the kinds of cancellation campaigns we saw during COVID over procedures, and around the same time, the all-or-nothing nonsense around whether you supported the BLM leaders' mansion fund.

It's not worth losing a job over seeing the writing on the wall before everyone else does, and calling it out publicly.

I've walked away from so many online conversations by simply not replying, and everything's fine. Those are now just dangling threads in the void that almost no one will discover or care about.