The memory forking seems like a cool technical achievement, but I don't understand how it benefits me as a user. If I'm delegating the whole thing to the AI anyway, I care more about deterministic builds so that the AI can tackle the problem.

Today, I don't think the tools are good enough to make a material difference. It may help a bad engineer tread water, but it won't take you from good to great. It may save you time writing basic boilerplate and individual functions, but I suspect 99% of engineers don't struggle with that. What's hard about our jobs is knowing how to orchestrate the whole thing and put structure around complexity. AI can't do that yet.

When I use it personally, it feels like a harder context switch trying to describe in english what I already know how to code. Then I still have to review the function to make sure it's accurate. It feels like a waste of time and an additional context switch.

Whenever the AI gets better, we'll have to use it to be productive I have no doubt. But the pool of engineers will change too - there will be a categories of engineers who can't debug the AI output and who still write crazy prompts.

Maybe I'm old, but I'll only be worried about AI when it can write and maintain a full app with no human intervention.

I don't think AI poses a risk when it comes to setting engineering priorities and building the roadmap. If it could do that, it could probably just build the entire system anyway.

EMs are there for the human aspect of engineering, so I also doubt it will impact hiring or EM-engineer ratios.

I do expect the bar to being an EM to be higher as the job will be more technical and less project management.

I'm currently working through an analytics architecture and I'm having to defend against "why aren't you using postgres" when I'm talking about olap dbs.

To be fair, these are the only examples I can think of and I only learned of these as I'm standing up new data infra using starrocks.

2. My team is 90% contractors. They've been here for years, but constantly complain about the legacy codebase they've been working on. We fail to hit our estimates/deadlines and the response is "we don't understand the codebase".

3. PM complains about our velocity, but nothing changes when I mention that epics need full product requirements and designs so that we can architect things and actually improve the codebase.

4. Sprints are just buckets of random tickets. Sprint goals are for losers.

For 1, I've brought up to my boss that we need more enablement teams and pointed to issues across many different teams that they would solve. Their answer was "hiring freeze, talk with the other managers to solve this".

For 2, I can see how shit the codebase is. I get it. But I've been here half as long and have been explaining how things work to them. I'm exhausted from having to handhold people who are making no effort to learn. I also think there's a significant technical skill gap where these contractors don't know how to architect solutions, but just create code bandaids.

For 3, I've talked with them about it and things change in the near term, but the next feature we work on will be a surprise, dumped on us last minute in sprint planning.

For 4, I talk about focusing on feature delivery, but I guess scrum is just buckets of random tickets???

I'm a pretty experienced manager and I don't know what to do. I want to point to a weak team of contractors and shitty legacy code as reasons, but these things feel like areas I should be able to improve.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34658069

Points: 1

# Comments: 7

On product work, we do an oncall rotation of 1 engineer per week that triages issues and handles prod outages. This may solve for your 'help desk' type work.

If this is the direction you want to go, the only way I can think of determining this is by telling the contractor to use a github account you control and then monitoring the logged in sessions.

It's less about taking on roles and just doing what needs to be done. Everything is a partnership in building the product, so I help where I'm needed most. When our hiring pipeline dried up, I'm the one doing outreach. When our test suite needed enhancements, I'm writing demo code to show best practices. When an upstream service pushed breaking changes, I'm the one pushing for process/communication changes.

Granted, my current org is a little bit of a mess, but every place I've worked at needed me to flex because it gives my team the ability to do what they do best - code. And since I'm fixing processes and not a bottleneck, I have a stronger case for promotion too.

As a manager, you have the freedom to set your own schedule and run your team the way you see fit. I don't know if I'd recommend that when you first start out, but you're judged based on the outcome - generally. Some managers still do 50% coding, which is fine, but I think those pitfalls need to be considered carefully.

Once my teams get to a self-sufficient status, we're able to take on more responsibility and do more "innovation" type projects. That's "success" in my mind, but it takes time to get there. Up until that point, I do whatever I need to.

The time off itself was great. I struggled to get away from needing to feel productive, but did explore some new tech and played some games. I would recommend a small break to anyone.

You would think being in management would make reentry harder, but I got a good pay bump and switched industries. The market is definitely hot. I also didn't get questioned about my time off. I framed it as "taking care of family" and that was the end of it.

I tell this to my newbies too - make sure you're developing good work habits. If this break is the result of the pandemic, do it. But if you're doing it to get away from work after only a few years of experience, be careful because unsustainable work habits don't go away.

I've found it an incredibly hard behavior to manage with no good outcomes. People acting in good faith just need to align on the allowed variance and the issue's done.

Generally, I'd expect the CTO/VP/Director to have more management experience, but in a lot of these cases, they may have the resume, but not the skills.

Has anyone had a career from selling management coaching or consulting on these issues?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446841

Points: 5

# Comments: 1