Toots from 2023-09-13

I would love to see a shift away from the “How can we get developers to care about {Security, R…

I would love to see a shift away from the “How can we get developers to care about {Security, Reliability, TCO, Efficiency, Complexity, Financials, Other}” style conversations. It’s reductionist and assumes that emotional investment at the sharp end is enough to produce a change in organizational decision making. If some outcomes didn’t improve, I don’t think the guidance would be “a developer needs to care harder”.

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There are too many non-functional system properties to be concurrently optimized in any system receiving customer traffic/usage. Individual caring is sufficient, but not necessary to produce different organizational outcomes. Invest in systems that make normal work incrementally and intermittently improve those outcomes.

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Asking individuals to care more is an emotional plea to a group of people who are likely already caring about a lot. If leadership cares about different outcomes, prioritize them, agree on success/checkpoint criteria, and give the team space to experiment and deliver the improvement.

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“One advantage of computers, of course, is that they don’t care about complexity. But that ad…

“One advantage of computers, of course, is that they don’t care about complexity. But that advantage is also a significant disadvantage. Until AI systems can generate code as reliably as our current generation of compilers, humans will need to understand—and debug—the code they write.”

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-real-problem-with-software-development/