| The article is excellent, and the way it suggests to communicate is great. I'm certainly taking notes. As a team lead myself, I've screwed up on this more than my share of times. Within a team, these advises are gold. At a higher level though, I can't help but feel our industry is taking so long to mature because everyone has to keep making the same mistakes over and over and we don't learn from history. Conversations often go like: Engineer A: "I'm going to do XYZ". Engineer B: "Hmm, we've tried XYZ, it exploded in our face" Engineer A: "I've had experience with XYZ on my side project/little startup, it works fine!" Engineer B: "Yeah, it works at first but eventually
problems arise and it will blow up" Engineer A: "Whatever, I'm doing it anyway" <6 months later> Engineer A: "See, it worked fine!" Engineer B points at the beggining of some problems Engineer A: "That's normal!" <6 months later> Engineer B: "Welp, as expected, it all went to hell. Where's Engineer A?" Engineer C: "Oh, Engineer A got bored and quit/joined another company. Looks like you're inheriting it, Engineer A!" Repeat...hundreds of times...for everything. |
There's definitely a strong bias in our industry towards "greenfield" things - everyone wants to do the fun, exciting, initial work. But once the new shiny coating has worn off there's a ton of really hard work to do with resilience, robustness, scaling, etc. Too many people just give up at that point, get bored, and do something else.