Will Gallego

Charity Majors on stage at DevOps Days NYC: "The cost of code isn't the writing, it's the maintaining. And ChatGPT will prove that right."

For sure on this. We can churn out lots of code with tooling, but "will it work?" and "will it be maintainable?" are *very* different things.

Jun 7, 2023 at 1:49pmWeb
Show threadWill GallegoJun 7, 2023

"Any asshole can spin up a bunch of AWS instances. It takes staff+ to run *less* code".

Charity not disappointing in strong opinions today

Show threadWill GallegoJun 7, 2023

Charity also mentioned (earlier) how early career eng and even senior eng shouldn't be on platform eng teams.

I want to disagree, but she's probably right. I'm not sure how someone first starting out can have the foundation to help other folks minimize doing the excess work and simplifying their flows (outside of a DevTools-like team).

Pushback welcome, this is my musings and not hers.

Show threadWill GallegoJun 7, 2023

For my own sake, I find it challenging to tell folks "We really shouldn't do this thing. We have a ton of very good things we all agree are necessary and we're chasing shiny mirages." They *might be* valuable, but we *know* the things in front of are.

You rarely win favor by telling folks no, but your teams flail otherwise.

Show threadKatie Sylor-MillerJun 7, 2023
@gallego I agree that it’s much harder to teach newer devs on a platform team. There are lots of folks who have done well with it IME, but all of them eventually move to product because it’s hard to support product without lots of experience as a product engineer
Show threadJoshua ZimmermanJun 7, 2023

@gallego I'm gonna put on my "I've been in this industry too long" hat and say "it depends".

I think there's a lot of this that hinges on how we define senior/staff and how early in a career we feel one can be considered "senior". *vaguely gestures to the Alspaw post on seniority*

There's also something to be said for organizational culture and structure. I'd suspect a culture that encourages more collaborative work processes to lower the bar. 1/2

Show threadJoshua ZimmermanJun 7, 2023

@gallego
e.g. If people across your org pair both on their team and across teams frequently, I think it would be easier for an earlier career engineer to pick up some of what they're missing.

But when it comes down to it, organizations like Heroku and AWS, who arguably are very large platform teams in a company sized trench coat are capable of hiring and training early career engineers. The key is that in a smaller org with less resources early career engineers will struggle on these teams.

Show threadJoshua ZimmermanJun 7, 2023
@gallego
But at the end of the day, the thing asked of a modern platform team is to build something akin to an infrastructure platform like Heroku, on a much smaller budget, with a much smaller team, that is more flexible/tailored to how engineers at the organization want to write/operate software. It shouldn't feel surprising that those lofty goals can easily create environments where its difficult for earlier career folks to succeed because the error margins have been made very small.
Show threadAndy FleenerJun 7, 2023
@gallego Meh I have had success putting "earlyish career" people on platform teams it can be done. BUT it can effect the velocity at which you build things because clear alignment and goals is always key to a teams success. Platforms are a domain just like anything else an early career engineer would need to learn.
Show threadAndy FleenerJun 7, 2023
@gallego Like generally more senior people can make connections and understand themes more that people with less experience but like that risk is inherent in other domains too. That's why you have domain experts on a team working in that problem space. In the platform case those domain experts happen to generally be engineers.
Show threadStephen ThorneJun 8, 2023
@gallego Charity is a smart person, and worth listening to.
Show threadWill GallegoJun 8, 2023
@jerub I want to agree, but I don't trust Unicorse, he's the most annoying unicorn in the world...