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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective.

You misread my comment as some dig at CRUD LOB enterprise coders. I used to work on enterprise ERP code with 20000+ tables. Yes, I agree it definitely wasn't simple.

Instead, I was responding to a very specific observation the gp made: he saw that both senior and junior devs were interchangeable when randomly assigning the next JIRA ticket.

That can only happen in a situation where the JIRA tickets are similar enough in complexity that the difference in skills between your senior and junior devs are irrelevant when the work is assigned.

Maybe some enterprise software teams can work like that. However, none of the engineering-heavy type of codebases can treat seniors and juniors interchangeably.

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All engineers should be spending more time "planning" than "doing".

Even before LLMs, the coding tasks were less than 50% of the time spent on all my Jira boards in the past 15 years. It makes perfect sense that they are assigned based on available capacity. By the time the coding begins, it's already too late to worry about implementation.

You're right that small tasks are trivial enough to be assigned to anyone. That's the point. That's how it feels to work on the "good" projects regardless of complexity. Planning a complex project should result in more tasks, not harder tasks. Your epics and stories can sometimes vary in points, but your tasks should not. A primary goal of the planning phase is figuring out how to keep them as low as you can. The points stop being meaningless when you think this way. They tell you where things are too lumpy. You throw more planning time at those lumps.

If assigning to a senior produces better code, you're not spending enough time planning ahead.

> Instead, I was responding to a very specific observation the gp made: he saw that both senior and junior devs were interchangeable when randomly assigning the next JIRA ticket. That can only happen in a situation where the JIRA tickets are similar enough in complexity that the difference in skills between your senior and junior devs are irrelevant when the work is assigned.

That’s not what I was saying.

I was saying that the perception of management is that the tickets are interchangeable. Not that the tickets are actually interchangeable.

Notice what I said after that. That this usually results in seniors coming in at the end to rescue the project.

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