alt Hacker NewsEvery engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true.
The two that stand out are
> Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead.
and
> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.
as a warning against about being too, too clever.
Replies
Agreed.
Not just engineers, but basically everyone involved in creating products including designers and PMs.
Every single bullet point here is gold.
Eh, sure.
But at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with "14 years at Google" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does.
This type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable. This is evident from the author's "bio" page: written in 3rd person, full of aggrandizing claims of their accomplishments, and photos with famous people they've met. I'm conditioned to tune out most of what these characters have to say.
If this is the type of people who excel in Big Tech, it must be an insufferable place to be.
Google still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies.
There's rarely a bullet point advantage that some new language or tech stack can offer me that would outweigh ten years of observation of how a familiar setup behaves in production, such that the space of unknown unknowns is reduced to almost nothing.