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Comment by grebc | Hacker News Reader

It’s always the journey that matters.

If you’re experienced as you are, you’re not learning the same way a junior assigned this might learn from it.

So the project I mentioned while I did write every single line of app code and IAC, made every architectural decision, etc., I did come on an off the project over the course of a year and I couldn’t even remember some of the decisions I made.

I also used Codex and asked questions about how the codebase worked to refresh my own memory. Why wouldn’t a junior developer do the same?

I mentioned that I had Codex describe in detail how it debugged it. It walked through each query it did, the lines of code it looked at and the IAC. It jogged my memory about code I wrote a year ago and after being on other projects

If you’re 50+ as you intimated in your first post then you have a wealth of knowledge that juniors don’t.

Just because it worked this time doesn’t mean it always will.

If you need further explanation of why you might want to spend more time resolving a bug to learn about the systems you’re tasked with maintaining then I’m at a loss sorry.

And then as experience developer you would have to try one of the other tools in your toolbox. Why should someone tie a hand behind their back and not use an LLM out of some sense of nerd pride?

How do you get the experience if you always just reach for your LLM?

This is a real issue we'll face soon enough. It's less of a problem for senior+ developers that have experience and muscle memory. For people just starting in the industry, they won't develop the ability to research problems and solve them on their own.

I work with some junior level, outsourced developers that write prompts like "fix the tests." The result is, of course, bad. The consulting company charges $200+ hour for them. Garbage in, garbage out. Good thing I hit my retirement number. I can bail out anytime.

Outsourced staff aug contractors have always been mediocre.

From the contracting side, I’ve worked as a staff Aug contractor for six weeks when I was between jobs in 2012 and it was so bad I just walked off with no job lined up within four weeks.

For context staff Aug vs consulting is about who owns the project

Consulting = the customer gives you high level requirements and statement of work and you control the project (or your company)

Staff Aug = the client controls the project and you are a warm disposable body.

hm I don’t disagree with you in principle but there is sooooo much outsourcing (America First and all that jazz people eat up during election cycles lol) that there are many places (worked in two such places just in the last year) where staff aug has been around for decade+ (started with team of 2, now 48). client controls everything, staff hacks shit and does amazing job. from my experience there is a ton of this and work of often anything but mediocre

Yep, with staff aug the developers are treated like cogs. Nobody good sticks around in that environment.

It's what managers or team leads experience. They have a team that work on the code and even if they used to know what was going on they end up doing everything second hand and they don't realise when the project is going wrong technically because they aren't spending the time to build knowledge and it all looks reasonable from 5000 feet.

They start to make questionable decisions based on how they think things are. I have done this. Getting back into development allowed me to see what was going wrong, why changes were difficult and what we needed to do to test properly.

Hurray, you're an AI manager now but be careful how much you decide to not look "in the box" especially if you're trying to come up with release dates and so on.

Before AI, I didn’t know how each line of code worked for a project I was responsible for but the work was done by lower level developers. If I had a question about how they implemented something I would ask them to walk me through it and give feedback - just like my CTO did with me when I was responsible for leading major initiatives. It’s been over a decade (before AI) where my responsibilities were only what I personally coded.

I treat AI just like a mid level developer ticket taker.

To a first approximation, no one gets ahead in corporate America or BigTech (been there done that) because they “codez real gud” and pull tickets off of a Jira board.

In the last decade+, I’ve been a early technical hire to lead a major initiative by a new manager/director/CTO respectively and none of them were interested in asking me questions about my coding ability. We spoke like seasoned professionals.

Even at my job in BigTech in the cloud consulting department (full time, RSU earning blue badge employee specializing in cloud + app dev) it was behavioral where they wanted to determine if I “were smart and got things done” [1]. My job after that where I am now as a staff consultant (full time employee) leading projects the interview was concerned about getting work done on time, on budget, meets requirements and whether the customer was happy with my results. Absolutely no one in the value chain cares about hand crafted bespoke code as long as it meets functional and non functional (security, scalability, usability, etc) requirements.

Of course. You've had to give up and operate at the people level and it works because all those above you are doing that even more so.

...and you want to get ahead.

But you've made a trade off and to think otherwise would be a mistake. Someone else has to straddle the line that you're floating above and obviously part of your job is to get hold of such people.

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