The Staff+ role is a fascinating place to be. Sometimes you feel accountable for everything yet nothing at the same time.

I would really love to see some reputable studies on the use of AI in software engineering I could read and reference. Does anyone have any steers on where I should look?

Just a small amount of facilitation training would go a huge way in a lot of orgs.

GenAI is a lot like an organisation with low psychological safety. It will try its best to please you, it won’t challenge you, and when I can’t please you with the truth it will make something up that’s untrue just to satisfy your demands . Yes I am on a train with too much time in my hands.

We’ve got this habit, especially in work and leadership, of turning complex, messy, human stuff into clean, objective metrics. It makes things feel manageable, like we’re in control.

“Vibe coding”… Phrases like this just make me want to get out of tech. My god. A bit dramatic, I know, but, I don’t love the direction our industry is headed at the moment. Short-termism in full effect. It’s going to be an interesting few years, that’s for sure.

Just spent way too long on the phone with EE renewing broadband. The classic story: new customer deals vs. renewal pricing games. But what really stood out? How long it took them to even find my account. Turns out, I’m on their “legacy” system, it took a good 30 minutes of my time.

Psychological safety is NOT about lack of disagreement. Psychological safety REQUIRES: * disagreement and debate * setting standards for behavior and performance, and enforcing them * telling people things they don't want to hear * courage, from the bottom up * humility, from the top down

“Indeed, AI remains only as good as the data on which it was trained, and the increasing volume of data on the internet being generated by AI risks making it less, not more, reliable.” - and here lies the fundamental flaw with gen AI.

Business/product uncertainty directly increases the complexity of the systems we produce, both software and organisational. I have no hard evidence this is true but I’m convinced it is.

One of my former colleagues asked how important it is for staff/principal engineers to be tech agnostic. My opinion is we should be and largely already are. The real value is understanding fundamentals, they translate to any technology.

Psychological safety is at an all-time low in organisations, largely driven by a macroeconomic climate resulting in a challenging job market. When people are more focused on keeping their jobs than challenging the status quo, innovation and continuous improvement become significantly harder.

I’m getting _a lot_ of follows from random accounts on here, that I’m not convinced are real. Anyone else? Have the Twitter bots come to invade BlueSky now too?

My QCon talk is available now for those folks who are interested. Really, it’s a talk about how we’ve optimised for flow over the years, from how we’re organised and interact, to how we make architectural decisions at scale - bit.ly/4fDFXS4

As a dog owner I’d be really pleased if fireworks were restricted to ONLY the night of the celebration/festivity. Poor thing.

So, this is the place to be now is it? Happy to see lots of old faces. Hopefully this can fill the hole Twitter left that Mastodon couldn’t quite fill!