alt Hacker NewsWhat kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place.
"I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.
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I don’t think it was made clear: the questions were about the code op “wrote” but they used a llm so couldn’t remember any of it. Probably got there from a git blame. This happens.
The implication is that, in the past, such a meeting would be fine, because they're an expert in what they've authored. It's "hey can you join for 5 minutes" because, in the past, they'd have had deep knowledge off the top of their head of the things they'd committed under their name.
But now they're not an expert in the code they've recently committed.
Maybe that's OK and expectations need to change, but I'd bet there are a lot of cases where the organization really wants to produce a (code, expert-in-the-code) pair, and should be willing to pay a little time to do that over producing just (code, guy-who-prompted-it).
This can happen more or less anywhere if you spend enough time at a company. At some point you'll get pulled into a meeting like this because others think you're in expert in a codebase/area you're not.
From the way it's written, looks like it's his code that he wrote recently.
It's quite common to search for the author of a piece of code to ask questions about that code.
Startup life man. Happy to help, just rough sometimes.
Not OP, but similar context (~20yr exp.). You absolutely can get away with "I'll need to dig more into this to give you a good answer" but you are _for sure_ expected to have at least some answer ready-to-go. Especially if it's under your purview.