onion2kMar 17

But you can’t just not review things!

Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team what you're going to build. The remain 10% of things like var naming, whitespace, and patterns can be checked with a linter instead of a person. If you can get the team to that level you can stop doing code reviews.

You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write, but if your reviews are there to check someone has done their job well enough then you have bigger problems.

Show threadloire280Mar 17
I've seen engineers I respect abandon this way of working as a team for the productivity promise of conjuring PRs with a coding agent. It blows away years of trust so quickly when you realize they stopped reviewing their own output.
Show threadoverfeedMar 17

Perhaps due to FOMO outbreak[1], upper management everywhere has demanded AI-powered productivity gains, based on LoC/PR metrics, it looks like they are getting it.

1. The longer I work in this industry, the more it becomes clear that CxO's aren't great at projecting/planning, and default to copy-cat, herd behaviors when uncertain.

Show threadtripledry

Would love to be a fly on the wall for a couple of months to see what corporate CxO's actually do.

Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin. Probably wouldn't be a massively successful one, but good enough to survive 2 years and have millions in the bank for that, or get fired and get a golden parachute.

(half) joking - most likely I'm massively trivializing the role.

Mar 17 at 7:55amWeb
Show threadeptcykaMar 17
A charitable explanation for what CxOs do is that they figure out their strategic goals and then focus really hard on ways to herd cats en masse to achieve the goals in an efficient manner. Some people end up doing a great job, some do so accidentally, other just end up doing a job. Sometimes parroting some linkadink drivel is enough to keep the ship on course - usually because the winds are blowing in the right direction or the people at the oars are working well enough on their own.
Show threadarethuzaMar 17

"Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin"

Having worked for a pretty decent CIO of a global business I'd say his main job was to travel about speak to other senior leaders and work out what business problems they had and try and work out, at a very high level, how technology would fit into that addressing those problems.

Just parroting latest technology trends would, I suspect, get you sacked within a few weeks.

Show threadraphlinusMar 17

Funny enough, the author of this blog post wrote another one on exactly that topic, entitled "What do executives do, anyway?"[1]. If you read it, you'll find it's written from quite an interesting perspective, not quite "fly on the wall," but perhaps as close as you're going to get in a realistic scenario.

[1]: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926

What do executives do, anyway?

An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in th...