Daniel Lee

ALT The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability). We can think of this as the just-say-no engineer, as opposed to the just-say-yes engineer. The just-say-yes engineer is obsessed with moving fast, approves code changes by default, values MTTR over MTBF, and tends to ship a lot of code. The just-say-no engineer is obsessed with quality, is happy to move slowly, and blocks code changes by default. Most engineers are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. By “just-say-no engineer”, I’m talking about the group of engineers who most strongly identify with that archetype.

ALT The just-say-no engineer is having a hard time in the era of AI. It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to. For the first time in their careers, they’re under a lot of pressure to lower their standards and start saying yes. However, this isn’t because of AI. It’s because of the end of ZIRP. ZIRP and the just-say-no engineer

ALT Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for completely selfish reasons that cannot be influenced by a well-meaning engineer Powerful stakeholders are typically so stupid and dysfunctional that it’s effectively impossible for you to identify their needs and deliver solutions to them The political game being played depends on private information that software engineers do not have, so any attempt to get involved will result in just blundering around Managers and executives spend most of their time playing politics, while engineers spend most of their time doing engineering, so engineers are at a serious political disadvantage before they even start

ALT The general idea here is that software engineers are simply not equipped to play the game at the same level as real political operators. This is true! It would be a terrible mistake for a software engineer to think that you ought to start scheming and plotting like you’re in Game of Thrones. Your schemes will be immediately uncovered and repurposed to your disadvantage and other people’s gain. Scheming takes practice and power, and neither of those things are available to software engineers. It is simply a fact that software engineers are tools in the political game being played at large companies, not players in their own right. However, there are many ways to get involved in politics without scheming.