Sorry forgot to reply!
Not really I was just sleeping
Hey ya’ll!
I was on a bit of a social media hiatus recently due to wedding stress, work stress, and *gestures vaguely at the world* but I’m slowly making my way back! Thank you for your patience!
Context Matters
Context is so important. Why did we do something that way? What else did we try? What were the original constraints? But we all know engineers are notoriously bad at documenting, especially our failures or misses. One thing I miss about open source culture when going to a different big tech culture is the sometimes YEARS of documentation in bugs all oversharing what we’ve tried, why it didn’t work, what we might be blocked on, and some more ideas we might have for the future. It made it much less painful when someone left, and even helped my future self understand something I did 2 weeks ago.
When I shared this snark this week, people commented it’s the sign of an unhealthy company to lose these knowledgable engineers, but I would argue the worse sign is that we still store the most valuable things we have - institutional knowledge - in someone’s brain with an average tenure of ~2 years.
Anyway unrelated I heard from peers this tweet was popular at several Big Tech Cos 😌
ICYMI
It’s true. Entire workflows are built around what worked 7 years ago.
Not likely - not even God could understand the ins and outs of Jira.
I’m a huge fan of humbling Harvard grads but I also think Waterloo grads need to chill TF out.
