←back to thread

61 points NotAnOtter | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.582s | source

My company is increasingly pushing prompt engineering as the single way we "should" be coding. The CEO & CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures.

I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company because I don't want

1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

Feel free to address my specific situation but I'm interested in more general opinions.

1. specialist ◴[] No.44468926[source]
Nah.

There's always pointless fads and food fights. Just tough it out. (Until a better gig comes along.)

I wish I could advise my young self "this too shall pass". The savvy play is to be a "team player". All those dumb hills I choose to die on... For dumb crap which eventually self-mooted all by themselves.

There was a comment (or a story?) some time back about how to survive as a software developer when projects are managed by Pointy Haired Bosses (PHBs). From memory:

Always be positive, optimistic.

Never say no or hedge or doubt.

Proactively manage upwards with enthusiastic status reports.

Instead of owning up to failures (due to fantasy estimates, ridiculous deadlines, scope creep, misc chaos, etc), list in detail all the great things and awesome progress you and your fantastic team have miraculously accomplished.

Like "reproducible builds which reduced failures by 1000% FTW, saving 30 hours per week" and "implemented boss' recommended pub/sub heptagonal meta architecture event sourced distributed pseudo sharded hybrid cloud something something, attaining sustained P95 latency of sub 3 picoseconds for 2 days"

Sadly, I was never able to keep up the act for more than 12 months. I'm just too contrarian, sarcastic, jaded. (I used to tell myself that I was "results oriented". I now see I was just an asshole. Everyone lies, needs to suspend disbelief, have a reason to crawl out of bed every morning. Who am I to piddle in their Cheerios?)

I'd like to think that if someone had clubbed young(est) me with the clue stick, I could have adapted.

YMMV. Happy Hunting.