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Not really I was just sleeping

Emily Kager
Jul 18, 2022
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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!

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Emily Kager @EmilyKager
Tag the @Meow at your company
12:57 AM ∙ Jul 8, 2022
78Likes3Retweets

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 😌

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Emily Kager @EmilyKager
the hardest part of software engineering is finding someone who 1. knows why we did that 2. still works at the company 3. is not on PTO / sabbatical
7:24 PM ∙ Jul 11, 2022
8,605Likes839Retweets

ICYMI

It’s true. Entire workflows are built around what worked 7 years ago.

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protected concerted activity enthusiast @BlueSpaceCanary
Programmers imprint like baby birds on whatever editor happens to be the first one they use with a remotely reasonable configuration
2:46 AM ∙ Jul 17, 2022
3,905Likes337Retweets

Not likely - not even God could understand the ins and outs of Jira.

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Madison Campbell @martyrdison
do you think god used jira to create the universe in 7 days that’s a really fast sprint
1:56 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2022
1,093Likes127Retweets

I’m a huge fan of humbling Harvard grads but I also think Waterloo grads need to chill TF out.

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Katz 🌌 @0xkatz
Reviewing resumes is fun!
Image
9:41 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2022
1,633Likes66Retweets

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