Untitled

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation, and we don't have a good culture of getting them up to speed. So now we have seniors that can barely write a function, much less reason about a complex system. I remember people used to debate all the time about if there were "10x" engineers or whatever. A few I'm sure, but I think the real problem is we have a lot of 0.1x engineers or worse.

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle. If the engineers would just think for a second, push back on Claude, even Claude would tell them this is bad. But they don't... Platform engineering is now 10x harder with terrible engineers and unlimited code machines. Don't even get me started on ffmpeg usage, engineers act like the resources are unlimited.

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. It's even worse than that. We've got a CEO who has suddenly learned how to vibe code and the stuff he's coming up with is... kind of horrendous. He's coming up with new "products" and proclaiming them the next big thing for us to work on and we're kind of over here scratching our heads asking who would want this? Who would pay for it? I mean, he was able to put together a kind of a cool web app (with 0 web app knowledge) that's supposedly going to let users design thingys with AI, but it just seems like he re-invented a harness/IDE. I suggested that maybe what he wants is a VS Code plugin like Cline or KiloCode... but he hadn't used VS Code.

> > bad engineers were always a liability > With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. Yup, and that's going to be the comeuppance for a decade of aggresive overhiring. There are so many "bad engineers" filling the ranks now that in many teams and divisions there's not even anyone left around who can recognize them as such. This was already manifesting as a rapid decline in software quality and worsening practices, and the amplification effect of AI is mostly going to make everything worse for a while as we wait for all these declining projects to buckle under their weight. If you are a good engineer, it's a good time to work on small teams with other good engineers and rigorous practices. You can be using AI to amplify what you do (and probably should), but you need to be rigorously considering your processes and guarding yourself from seduction by blind-leading-blind hype you see on social media or in iconference talks.

> The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I wouldn't be so quick to judge the long tenured engineers. They probably realized that moving business forward is more important than writing artisan code. You always have some young hotshot who comes in and wants to rewrite your old boring Java monolith into a micro services disaster for "better architecture". The greybeards learned the life lessons the hard way. The other aspect to consider is this: stay in this industry long enough and it will beat the soul out of you.