Comment by cogman10
6 months ago
Definitely a possibility.
However, I have a very strong suspicion they also didn't understand the GPT output.
To flush out the situation a bit further, this was a performance tuning problem with highly concurrent code. This engineer was initially tasked with the problem and they hadn't bothered to even run a profiler on the code. I did, shared my results with them, and the first action they took with my shared data was dumping a thread dump into GPT and asking it where the performance issues were.
Instead, they've simply been littering the code with timing logs in hopes that one of them will tell them what to do.
I'm sorry, how is this a "senior engineer"? Is this a "they worked in the industry for 6 years and are now senior" type situation or are they an actual senior engineer? Because it seems like they're lacking the basics to work on what you yourself seem to consider senior engineer problems for your project.
Also, what is your history and position in the company? It seems odd that you'd get completely ignored by this supposed senior engineer (something that usually happens more often with overconfident juniors) if you have meaningful experience in the field and domain.
> how is this a "senior engineer"? Is this a "they worked in the industry for 6 years and are now senior" type situation...
Yeah, this is the situation exactly, though I've known a few seniors that were senior just because they've hung around and not experience.
> what is your history and position in the company? It seems odd that you'd get completely ignored by this supposed senior engineer
Been with the company for over a decade at this point. I think I have a pretty good reputation generally. Someone sent me a "This is why cogman10 is the GOAT" message for some of my technical interactions on large public team chats.
Why I'm being ignored? I have a bunch of guesses but nothing I'm willing to share.
It sounds like the engineer may have little/no experience with concurrency; a lot of folks (myself included) sometime struggle with how various systems handle concurrency/parallelism and their side effects. Perhaps this is an opportunity for you to “show not tell” them how to do it.
But I think my point still holds—it’s not the tool that should be blamed; the engineer just needs to better understand the tool and how/when to use it appropriately.
Of course, our toolboxes just keep filling up with new tools which makes it difficult to remember how to use ‘em all.