Mastodawn

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116695372319811855

This!! I am yelling this too!!

And it’s yet another one of the things where now when I yell it, I have to specify that it’s something I’ve been telling students and companies alike since long before the release of GPT, because otherwise people assume it’s just a reaction to gen AI:

“Generating code is by •far• the easiest part of programming.”

“No matter the source, don’t let code into your project unless you understand what it does.”

“Programming languages exist for humans to communicate with other humans. Code does not just make machines go; it encodes and reifies human mental models. Good code communicates •intent•; very bad code has no coherent intent at all.”

and so on

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Shannon Clark Jun 5

@inthehands Yup. 100% this.

When I manage developers (and when I talk with people about careers in development) I explain that communication within your team IS the job. The lines of code is the easy stuff - the conversations about what to code, who should do what/when, the approach to take, how to test it, how to verify it, how to deploy it with limited risk (and how to recover if a problem shows in up production etc)

All that IS the job. The code is the easiest bit. The communication is key

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🟥 Eveline Sulman 🇳🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦Jun 6

@Rycaut @inthehands sounds familiar. I always have to tell my colleagues that answering e-mails and consulting colleagues IS their job, not something that disturbs their job...

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Shannon Clark

@EvelineSulman @inthehands yes. And this is where I also disagree with some folks about the value of those mythical “10x” engineers who just want to write code but never want to talk with colleagues, check in their code with empty or one line descriptions “fixed bugs” or “added machine learning” and otherwise don’t work with the team.

They almost always are a bigger risk than reward - when they leave their code is typically nearly impossible for anyone else to maintain and often is a black box

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Shannon Clark Jun 7

@EvelineSulman @inthehands the real superstar developers are the folks who not only write good code but also write great descriptions, mentor others on their code, collaborate with the team and teach new and old developers new tricks and skills. I’ve know some folks like this - they were incredible managers, brilliant technologists and left their teams and the company as a whole stronger and more resilient because while they were good they also played well with others and raised everyone up