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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

The problems is the best devs aren’t the ones doing all the work. You have shitty devs too who are barely thinking or checking anything mixing slop code in with what whatever the best devs are doing, so it all eventually turns to shit.

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The job of the best devs is to build the system ("the harness") that let's anyone build near their level of competency by unloading their heuristics into the harness. That is what the most senior, most talented devs on the team need to be doing so that the baseline gets lifted across the board.

that's a pointless endeavor. The seniors should just be building everything, not wasting time working on a harness that won't guarantee results anyway.

The seniors shouldn't be building the product; the product team can build the product directly. There is no reason for a product manager to ask a senior engineer to fix the spacing or update the tab sequence for some workflow. The harness should be sufficient for them to do at least that. Get it right and a product manager should be able to build whole features if enough of the heuristics and system level constraints are in place.

Then there is no reason to have engineers at all.

Not quite; the point of the engineers is to build the machinery to make this "safe". Establishing key architectural decisions, rails, and safeguards; things that a product team isn't going to be able to resolve on their own.

What it does speak to me is that only the most senior engineers still have a significant role.

It won't be long before the best devs are working and the shit ones are not

Assuming management has the ability to tell the difference and not just count lines of code or commits.

this assumes it's easy to differentiate between the two groups.

and if this trend will continue the good ones increasingly aren't going to be working either. hopefully they realize they are getting themselves there by cooperating

How to separate them if the code is already mixed?

You're assuming that management cares about having good software more than it cares about replacing developers with a machine.

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