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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place.

"I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

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Not OP, but similar context (~20yr exp.). You absolutely can get away with "I'll need to dig more into this to give you a good answer" but you are _for sure_ expected to have at least some answer ready-to-go. Especially if it's under your purview.

I don’t think it was made clear: the questions were about the code op “wrote” but they used a llm so couldn’t remember any of it. Probably got there from a git blame. This happens.

The implication is that, in the past, such a meeting would be fine, because they're an expert in what they've authored. It's "hey can you join for 5 minutes" because, in the past, they'd have had deep knowledge off the top of their head of the things they'd committed under their name.

But now they're not an expert in the code they've recently committed.

Maybe that's OK and expectations need to change, but I'd bet there are a lot of cases where the organization really wants to produce a (code, expert-in-the-code) pair, and should be willing to pay a little time to do that over producing just (code, guy-who-prompted-it).

Startup life man. Happy to help, just rough sometimes.

This can happen more or less anywhere if you spend enough time at a company. At some point you'll get pulled into a meeting like this because others think you're in expert in a codebase/area you're not.

Like if your the manager of a group and you do little code writing.

> "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

By the time you said that, the AI could have given the 80% answer. So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

> So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

If the AI could answer the questions, why would they ask OP about it?

What are “your tools”? Many (most?) meaningful questions cannot be answered while you stall for time on a call. Or do you just mean ask an LLM the question and regurgitate its answer?

From the way it's written, looks like it's his code that he wrote recently.

It's quite common to search for the author of a piece of code to ask questions about that code.

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