text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
The easy way to influence company politics is to - instead of having one idea that you're pushing, have a kind of stable of ideas that you have ready to go at any given moment. And then when it becomes time for that idea, you'll have something you want to do in the bag already. And when I say time for that idea, compan... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:18\] Well, I don't have anything to add on that one, Adam, because I've never been in a large organization. So I can just take Sean's words as gospel truth, I guess, that it just works. I can't even push back, or anything. How about you? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I can definitely resonate with the having many ideas in the bag sentiment, because I think I kind of -- you know me, Jerod, I kind of do that. I kind of have this smorgasbord of things that have just been interesting to me, and I think it really is just timing. So I can resonate with that, at least,... |
**Sean Goedecke:** That's a really interesting point. One theme I get a lot in emails and messages from readers is that I've helped them feel less sad about working for large enterprise companies. I've helped them reconcile themselves to their roles as cogs in the machine... Which - I don't know if I would have picked ... |
So there's a sense in which how I think of making technical decisions in large organizations is kind of flowing on from this kind of broader political commitment to -- you know, there's just not that much you can do about the broad structure of capitalism. You just kind of have to exist in it as best you can. |
**Break**: \[23:18\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you know the term emotional intelligence? And if you do, do you think that you are a relatively strong emotional intelligence person? |
**Sean Goedecke:** I do know the term emotional intelligence. If you'll forgive a brief digression - I have two dogs, I have two greyhounds. One of them is a complete maniac, and the other is a giant baby, a big boy. Not very smart, but my mom, who's head over heels in love with the dogs, likes to say that he has great... |
About myself - no, I don't think I have particularly great emotional intelligence. I don't think that's one of my strengths. But what I do have in that area, I think I've come to via analysis, by kind of thinking through it carefully, which I don't think is how you're supposed to do it, but... I don't think it comes pa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're augmenting the EQ for the IQ. |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, although I don't know if I have great IQ either. I think I just have a lot of persistence when it comes to thinking about the same problem for years. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I bring that up is because I'd actually talked to a fellow just last night, as a matter of fact... My son does ninja training; not like ninja fighting, but like ninja, American ninja warrior. I think it's also become popular in other countries, that's where I kind of became aware of i... |
**Sean Goedecke:** That's really well put, and that's absolutely correct. Before I even blogged like I do now, maybe eight years ago, one of the really, really early blog posts I wrote, called "Avoiding Worry-Driven Development", and absolutely most software engineers I've worked with have not been primarily held back ... |
So you might be technically very capable, but there are certain kinds of technical change that you're just not really willing to do, that you're like letting other people do who maybe don't have your technical expertise, which - that can really hurt a team. But yeah, there's more ways than I could articulate where kind... |
\[30:04\] |
***Jerod Santo:** Jerod here in post... Just wanted to let you know that Adam had to step out unexpectedly. So when you don't hear from him for the rest of the show, that's why.* |
**Jerod Santo:** One thing I want to talk about, which is tangential to this, is taste. I think, especially with the rise of AI code gen, we are seeing now that our ability to have and to influence good taste in software engineering is becoming more valuable, and our ability to execute the technical bits by hand becomi... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, sure. So this approach definitely comes from my background in analytic philosophy, where if we're not sure what something is, we often try to do what we call conceptual analysis on it, sometimes I think a little bit bombastically, called conceptual engineering... \[laughs\] Perhaps much like so... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Sean Goedecke:** But the idea is to take this kind of concept that you're not sure about, like taste, and try to explain it in terms of another concept that you have a better handle on, in this case values. So really, you're starting from this point where people use the word taste to mean a lot of different things; p... |
And by values I don't mean necessarily your ethical values. I mean the things you care about when you sit down to do software engineering. So for instance, you might care about reliability, you might care about performance, you might care about accessibility, you might care about having your code well factored, you mig... |
When somebody's sort of set of values match your set of values, you might say they have good taste... I take it one step further, I say that your set of values can be a good or bad fit to the project you're working on itself. And I say that when your set of values is a good fit for the project you're working on, that's... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[34:10\] Well, that's interesting. I'm finding that my own values - and I do think that fitting them to the project is smart... I think that's a good way to go about it, because that's ultimately what you're there to serve, is what you're currently working on... Not necessarily yourself, or some sort ... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you would have more context on this than me having been in the industry longer, but certainly for me the last three years and the last year even have been the largest, the most rapid time of change I can recall for my entire time in the industry. And not even just because of... |
And yeah, a lot of the old ways of thinking about things no longer apply. You almost want to list the things that haven't changed, because the change has been so extreme. Although I do think it depends where you are. One thing I believe is software engineering is -- there's so many different types of work wrapped up in... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, for sure. |
**Sean Goedecke:** And I think a lot of those engineers kind of look at discussions like these and they think "What are these people talking about? AI agents are just not there yet." But for somebody like me, who works -- a lot of what I do is kind of web servers, and protobuf mangling, and fairly standard kind of form... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I've even experienced that in my own work where there's certain areas of what I'm doing, specifically using - I won't say bleeding edge, but just like modern frontend technologies, and specifically CSS technologies, SVG etc, where I find that they completely lack the ability to do what I want the... |
\[38:02\] And then I'm doing something else, writing some sort of static generator in Go, and it's like "I didn't write any of this code." I've helped it refactor along the way, but it's totally capable of doing this with just a little bit of direction from somebody who knows what they want, and they have some taste in... |
And so yeah, it's just not evenly distributed, both in like technology, and like verticals, but then also across the industry and what you're working on. Everybody's mileage is going to vary, and I think we're getting very small mileage right now, and I just can't imagine that it's going to stay right here... Because I... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, your example is really interesting to me, about needing to write your own sort of CSS, and SVG code, but having the Golang stuff be automated... Because to me, it's been almost the reverse. |
**Jerod Santo:** Has it? \[laughs\] |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, I've kind of used AI agents to write most of my frontend stuff, certainly for my blog... But at work, sometimes when I'm writing Golang code, I find that I have to kind of do it by hand, because the agent's not quite there yet for what I want to do. But I think that kind of just reflects, you k... |
But to your broader point, I absolutely agree. I think there's going to be a new set of engineering values that comes in when this technology stabilizes... And it's very hard to say in advance what those values are going to be. I mean, how much engineers are going to need to manually review the work of AI agents as wel... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a really big question, is how much -- right now it's made code review extremely valuable, right? Your ability to look at a written piece of code, whether it's from a human or an agent or whatever, and judge appropriately "Is it good enough? Does it need to be rewritten? Where are all the p... |
**Sean Goedecke:** \[41:45\] I do think readability is never going to go away. I think it may go away for like Python and Golang and JavaScript, but I think if it does go away there, it's going to kind of recede back into the prompt, in a sense. So for instance, writing readable, coherent assembly code used to be part ... |
Some people are saying - and I don't know if I believe it, but some people are saying that English is kind of the new programming language, that your expression of the spec is sort of your programmer work product. And whatever it is that the programmer or whoever is giving to these AI agents, I think it's always going ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, 100%. And we definitely see that being formalized in things like spec-driven development at this point... Although we're not at the point where you write the spec and that's all you write. You're still going beyond the spec, but maybe we get to a place where all we're reading are specs and user s... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Well, we'll see. I mean, the ideal specs for AI agents might end up looking a little bit like code. They might end up being kind of technically specific enough to... But I think it's hard to look at the future and say it's getting less interesting to be a software engineer. I mean, the last three yea... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's very interesting right now. |
**Sean Goedecke:** For good or ill. So yeah, maybe we're headed towards a world where it's much more boring to be a software engineer, but certainly, if it continues like it has been, that's not what's happening. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, it's a bit ironic that what these things seem to be best at are the most artistic aspects of white-collar work... Whereas we were hoping that they would do the dishes and the laundry, instead they're doing the art and the videos and the code. We're writing the docs and they're writing the c... |
**Sean Goedecke:** It's the great paradox of working with large language models, that they're terrible at the things that ordinary computer programs are really good at, and they're really good at things that ordinary computer programs are terrible at. It's a different way of doing it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, that's where the advent of the tool has been so amazing. Again, when I talk about the software around the models getting so much better, the fact that GPT-5 can't do -- they can't count how many R's are in strawberry, or whatever, famously... But it doesn't have to now. It knows that when a... |
**Sean Goedecke:** \[45:58\] Yeah. I mean, this is something that -- this was anticipated, for sure. I think in 2020 Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote "Situational Awareness." Maybe not 2020. Check that. But years and years ago, long before AI was the thing that it is today. And one of the things he wrote about in that was w... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's a good call. And had I known about the tool calling as an option back in 2020, I wouldn't have been calling for this plateau so easily... Because I just wasn't seeing the models get that much better and I kept thinking "Okay, we've hit a plateau. We have to move beyond transformers to a ne... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Not in 2020... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, okay. |
**Break**: \[47:47\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Assuming that code review stays relevant, you wrote a good post called "Mistakes I See Engineers Making in Their Code Reviews." I think it was back in September. And I think that's something that our audience would certainly love to hear, because code reviews right now is such a valuable skill, and doi... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.