Comment by bilekas
19 hours ago
I came to say somethign simular actually.
> Ah, baby, this is my senior developer. The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. They want to avoid development as much as they can.
There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.
I think this is more a matter of perspective, rather than original meaning.
I read the above as "avoid development that increases complexity needlessly" — and often, there is a desire to overcomplicate something that can be much simpler because the understanding is lacking.
"As much as they can" does not mean trying not to do any work, but trying to simplify the work where it achieves desired outcomes, and just about! This frequently means doing the improvement today.
> There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.
This is what I was thinking - I'd say the biggest step up a developer can make is to recognize that sometimes you need a bit of one approach, sometimes a bit of another one.
Sometimes minimalism is the way, and you need to wonder if the pain, workload or lacking capabilities and features are problematic. Or, sometimes adding the smallest possible thing is a good way, as long as we don't paint ourself into a corner and enable learning and accumulating information of what we actually need.
Sometimes buying a thing is a good way, if you can find a good vendor and a tool fitting your use case and especially if the effort of doing it on your own is high. This commonly occurs in security, because keeping up to date with the ongoing vulnerability and threat landscape can be a full job on its own.
And sometimes adding something bigger is the way, if the effort of maintaining it are less than the effort and pain incurred by not having it. Or if we can ramp up the effort of the thing incrementally, while reaping benefits along the way. This can be validated often by doing a small thing.
What the AI will do in my opinion is to push the bar more in this direction. Cozily hacking CRUD-Code in a web server together most likely won't be enough in a year or two for the average development job.
That doesn't sound as good in meetings. The person who can cut scope and get everyone to the "we did it" back patting phase makes everyone feel warm and cozy.
Now combing through analytics to determine whether or not what we did was actually good? Less warm and cozy.
This is where good leadership in the dev team is needed.
Is the improvement likely to reduce maintenance overhead (and thus cost)? Or improve performance allowing for fewer services running (and thus reducing cost)? Or reduce bugs that force people out of a workflow (eg in an online shop, thus fixing it increases sales)?
Or if it’s just tech debt then use Jira (etc) to your advantage and talk about the number of tickets you can close of this sprint due to this engineering initiative.
If the development team and product teams goals are largely aligned then the problem with engineering initiatives is just how you explain them to the product team.
For a large enough problem you need a combination of enough skill (to do the job), enough foresight (to know what likely will go wrong and how much error budget you need), and skin in the game (so you dont just cut things that sound good but instead what is truly needed) - if you don't have all three of these you usually are just talking out of your ass.
both of these things are equally important. every change will annoy somebody. every change breaks somebody's workflow.
preventing the unnecessary changes can help you get the political capital in your org to push through the changes that really need to happen.
I am an avoider and also a serial trend-hopper. You can do both!
Exactly.