alt Hacker NewsC* can mean anything.
The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second.
I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month.
I fixed the SQL query, the problem was gone forever.
The same CTO got lulled into some weird talks with some AWS Account Manager for no reason. He told me what we should do and i explained to him how all of this (nicely of course) doesn't correlate to what we have, do and need.
I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
Replies
there was an engineering director at my previous company (and who was former Amazon) who wrote his first PR with Claude
it had 30k lines of diff and was a complete refactor of how one of our core features worked
the staff eng he tagged to code review it politely declined to do so and given that this director was let go fairly recently, I'd like to imagine that the PR will exist as a fun surprise for any future maintainer running cleanup
Most things get done in spite of management, not because of it.
> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.
Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.