Metadata
- Author: Charity Majors
- Full Title:: Generative AI Is Not Going to Build Your Engineering Team for You
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://news.dataelixir.com/t/t-l-ehhkjll-yuuitdetk-j/
- Finished date:: 2024-06-21
Highlights
To some extent, this is just what happens as an industry matures. The early days of any field are something of a Wild West, where the stakes are low, regulation nonexistent, and standards nascent. If you look at the early history of other industries—medicine, cinema, radio—the similarities are striking. (View Highlight)
Software is an apprenticeship industry. You can’t learn to be a software engineer by reading books. You can only learn by doing…and doing, and doing, and doing some more. (View Highlight)
What does it mean to be a senior engineer? It means you have learned how to learn, first and foremost, and how to teach; (View Highlight)
By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that. (View Highlight)
. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle. (View Highlight)
Sociotechnical systems consist of software, tools, and people; understanding them requires familiarity with the interplay between software, users, production, infrastructure, and continuous changes over time. These systems are fantastically complex and subject to chaos, nondeterminism and emergent behaviors. If anyone claims to understand the system they are developing and operating, the system is either exceptionally small or (more likely) they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. Code is easy, in other words, but systems are hard. (View Highlight)
The present wave of generative AI tools has done a lot to help us generate lots of code, very fast. The easy parts are becoming even easier, at a truly remarkable pace. But it has not done a thing to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder. (View Highlight)
Honestly, most of the work that most teams have to do is not that difficult, once it’s been broken down into its constituent parts. There’s plenty of room for lower level engineers to execute and flourish. (View Highlight)
• We need more senior engineers as an industry • Somebody has to train them (View Highlight)
But long-term thinking is not a thing that companies, or capitalism in general, are typically great at. Framed (View Highlight)