Ten Things I Read This Week
Software Development
Is Engineering Strategy Useful?
There’s always a strategy, even if it isn’t written down.
The single biggest act you can take to further strategy in your organization is to write down strategy so it can be debated, agreed upon, and explicitly evolved.
Hiring
I appreciated this post on an effective hiring pipeline. Put code first and know what you are looking for. Too many hiring pipelines are bogged down with convoluted interviews and challenges that don't relate to the job.
Travis Turner
Ethan Marcotte Leaves 18F
Ethan Marcotte, the inventor of responsive design, wrote a thoughtful and harrowing piece on leaving his role at a US government agency.
Leadership
I've been reading and writing a lot about the skills needed for our jobs and thinking about how that relates to managment roles. This post gives a good history on the role of middle management in the past few decades.
Geftic predicts there will be new kinds of leadership roles for engineers to pursue that marry strategic planning and technical know-how with the soft skills typically associated with people-management position
Kelli Korducki
Science & Technology
Catalytic Computing
An attempt to answer, "Can you still use a full hard drive?"
Ben Brubaker
AI
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
An academic paper on the risks to society of language models getting larger and larger.
The critical takeaway is that making a language model bigger does not eliminate bias. The size does not equal diversity.
If we want sharper LM tools, we need sharper training data.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
AI Is Not About "Prompt Engineering"
Shocker. I know. This is a great article about using LLMs for software development. In my own words, learning to use LLMs means learning the skills we've always needed for the job.
Brigitta Bökeler on Reasoning and Coding
Reasoning models are still too slow to be helpful in coding tasks. I've found this to be true myself. At times, it takes just as long to give a model the right context and wait for its response as it would for me to try a solution out myself.
Birgitta Böckeler
Random
Life in Weeks
Gina Trapani mapped out her life in weeks. But more importantly, I looked at the HTML and this is also her life in weeks as HTML buttons.
On Fixing
I was reminded of Norman White's post about the right to repair when I was researching for Good Hacks
I don't really fix toasters, although I'd be proud if I could. Almost nobody fixes toasters. This is because a modern toaster is nearly impossible to fix, held together with little bendy tabs which break off if you bend them more than twice. The toaster manufacturer naturally expects that you do the Right Thing -- toss that dysfunctional item in the dump and buy a new one! All in all, the working toaster is a perfect symbol for modern utility in general... glamourous and efficient! Nevertheless, staring at this glamourous efficient high-resolution computer screen for hours at a time, you and I are both wrecking our eyes, not to mention our social lives. But, hey, I don't mind... do you?
