There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something
that should not be done at all
— Peter Drucker
Despite what the godfather of management says, what the engineers want to talk
about is:
Programming languages
AI
Cloud providers
UI Libraries
APIs
DevOps
Architecture patterns
Databases
What the customer doesn’t care about: (see above).
The things in the list don’t even matter! They’re fungible. Given three
mainstream choices for programming language, AI, cloud, etc., literally any
combination of them is sufficient.
A spike is a sudden, dramatic increase in demand, effort, or activity that far
exceeds normal operating levels. I consider spikes a threat to sustainability.
Startup culture’s reliance on the veneer of coolness and a potential future
payoff as a way to fortify employees against these spikes will shape the
workforce, selecting for younger people who are more naive and risk tolerant.
The effects of this compound over time.
