Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Dan LaMotte's avatar

> One of the engineers proposed having a chat with the team responsible for the upstream system and tell them not to send that particular state change so that we wouldn't have to consider it.

> I am abhorred and endeared at the same time by so much innocence.

I'm glad to hear you say this. For me, maybe its because I lack trust in anything that I cannot directly control, but forward progress for me is always about something I have direct control of. I cannot guarantee other teams hold up their side of the bargain, so I focus on the aspects of the system I can fix to handle the 'environment' it's working in (sometimes that other team is a massive open source project that has even less control *cough* kubernetes *cough* [as opposed to another team in the same company where leaders may be shared and have influence]). That philosophy has always served me well and ensured that even when the contract is broken, the system continues to function.

> Or is this an unwinnable battle?

I have mostly resigned to this being unwinnable. I am trying again to win this battle. But its slow and painful and amounts to 1on1 convincing a person at a time. Critical mass looks like enough 'leaders' pushing I guess. And/or enough code that 'copying/pasting' any random snippet leads to the same result (as much as I hate copy/paste code).

This is where science/engineering meets art for me. And subjectiveness creeps in which makes it hard to 'win' (because what is 'winning'? is it even correct?). So, the table is already tilted against us. Beyond this, timelines motivate some folks to not care about these aspects (not necessarily their fault, they are at a different spot in life).

I find myself using the phrase that has always captured it so succinctly. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". Individuals can shine in any culture, but the group culture has significant pressure to avoid change.

Expand full comment
Peter Dornbach's avatar

How about training an AI model on carefully handpicked changelists, which Jos extensively commented on? Maybe not yet. But maybe soon.

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts