Kelsey Hightower on Bluesky (and X but who's on there anymore). Article is here.
100% agree, and I've seen this recently. Times are and have changed. The neckbeard in a basement, hacking out code (then selling the dinosaur eggs... oh wait)... its long gone.
Might be a bit more relevant in huge organisations where there is enough slack to allow one person to focus on one area - but not in anything smaller. Which is pretty much everything.
You will always be a better-rounded engineer by learning how the business works, not learning that new javascript framework.
JD
On Wednesday, I went along to the MOVAC Engineering Jam session, which was a session for engineering leads, to hear some war stories and the like from experienced engineering leaders around New Zealand.
Overall, it was a really good event, and good to catch up with quite a few people who I've not seen for a long time.
JD Trask' talk was a standout for me, quite definitely bear-poking, as is his style.
He was talking about coddled engineers (my term), and how quite a lot of people working in engineering now have never been through a down cycle, which is what we are in now. The last one was the GFC in 2008, and before that, the .COM bubble collapse, tho that was mostly affecting US folks.
This is something I've been thinking about and discussing with others. Layoffs and restructuring, while hard, are a fact of life in business sometimes, as are salaries which go up and down with the market (or usually, don't go up if you already have a job).
Looking around at my last few jobs, most of the people I've worked with recently would not have been working in 2008, so their whole career has been in a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon (ZIRP) situation. A situation we are very much not in anymore, it's an employers market right now (lots of engineers, not many jobs), but looking around there are a lot of people who've not worked this out yet, especially in the US in FAANG or adjacent companies.
Another fact of engineering highlighted by JD, is while the norm should be 40 hours (ish), if the platform is down, you stay until it's up. Sure, ask for other engineers to sub in if needed, but as an industry we get a crazy amount of perks - nice gear, very high salaries, a lot of autonomy and say about how, when and where we work. That has to come with the agreement that sometimes - not always - we can't just walk away from the burning fire in production and say "yeah, it's 5pm, I'll fix it tomorrow". Even more so if your platform is 24/7 with a majority of international customers.
I'm deliberately not going into too much detail on what he said - it wasn't under Chatham House Rules, but I don't feel these stories are mine to re-tell, outside of my impressions of them.
Nat on Burnout
The last one up at the MOVAC event was Nat Torkington, who was talking a bit about his burn out from a previous job (again, no specific details as its not my story to share), and how some of the product and engineering aspects went down when the company got... shall we said "fucked over".... by Google.
Nat mentioned how, for him, when he burnt out things just went black and white, lost their colour. He couldn't get off the couch for ages, and... well, worse, but that's his story to tell if he wanted to.
I'm not sure how far down the hole I've been recently, but that really struck a note.
I think I'm out of it now - exercise and finishing a few things at work have helped - but I think the combination of a bad, persistent "cold"; no exercise; some work I wasn't expecting and of the kind which causes me a disproportionate amount of stress; and August, which is traditionally a shit mood/energy month for me (I've already made a rule with myself - for the past 15+ years - to never make life-changing plans in August), put me either into a bit of burnout, or fully in it.
And it was hard to tell from the inside at the time.
Thinking a bit more, I suspect the "cold" might have had more to do with it. It wasn't a bad one while I had it - just in my nose, not even in my chest - but I had a few days off work, feeling almost well enough to work (but "yeah, but I can SAY I'm sick enough...."), but as soon as I tried to do a full day of work: nope. Brain fog. Back to Netflix. Do not pass go.
It wasn't COVID - I tested a few times, plus I normally get a really specific headache when I get COVID or a booster, and I didn't have that at all. No idea what it was, but the tail end of it wasn't nice.
Glad to be done with the whole thing to be honest.
