It does explain how vulnerable they are to the anti-instrumentation sales pitch.
The idea that you might not have to have anyone who deeply understands your systems? That you can pay them $$$$ and they will autoinstrument your code and tell you what to look at? So, so tempting.
WRT instrumentation: we can make it easier, we can gather a ton of stuff up automatically, we can write libraries to standardize and enable and more.
But auto-instrumentation is exactly as useful and as usable as auto-generated commenting for your code.
Which is because that is exactly what it is: a record of programmer intent.
Comments: "What I plan to do"
Instrumentation: "What I am doing"
Instrumentation (for observability) is simply commenting your code for interpretation at runtime.
(Instrumentation for metrics is a bit different, it often serves as a translation layer between code and low level systems statistics. But let's keep it simple.)
It's not a bad litmus test. If you don't have to do *some* instrumentation by hand, it probably isn't observability.
On the subject of senior engineers and their lack of fungibility: this gets more and more true the more senior they get.
When an engineer is growing from junior->intermediate->senior, we want them to become a reasonably well rounded senior engineer.
This doesn't always happen, sadly, but part of a manager's job is making sure you eat your vegetables.
That you don't just do the one or two things you enjoy and are good at over and over, but are exposed to various parts of the stack, and know enough not to be dangerous.
But once someone is solidly a senior engineer -- once you know what you like and what you don't, and are less of a danger to yourself and others -- then your path is in your hands.
And people tend to become more and more...specific...versions of themselves, as they grow.
Engineers who are 3-5 years out of college are way, WAY more fungible (on average) than engineers who are 10, 20, or 30 years removed.
I don't just mean when it comes to languages and technologies, either. The way you interact with your team+org is probably more important.
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The question is, how can you interview and screen for engineers who care about the business and want to help build it, engineers who respect sales, marketing and other functions as their peers and equals?
It's a great question!! I have ideas, but would love to hear from others.
I said "question", but there are actually two: 1) how to hire engineers who are motivated by solving business problems and 2) aren't engineering supremacists.
Pro tip: any time you see someone confidently opining on what all good CTOs know or do, it is ✨bullshit✨
There is no stock template for CTO, or default set of expectations or responsibilities. It stands alone among the C-levels in that good ones are all over the freaking map.
This may not hold true for publicly traded companies. But in my experience, a good CTO can be:
* over all of R&D
* over engineering, like a VP eng
* like a principal eng or architect
* team lead for special projects
* a great senior programmer
(continued... 👉)
A CTO can also be:
* a great communicator and popularizer
* on the road as a devrel
* a field CTO, whose authority opens doors to big customers
* a product visionary who sweats the details
* more of a cofounder than technical contributor, sharing "company-running" duties w/CEO
Yeah, this is a fair caveat. If you're already a decent senior engineer and manager, it's kind of possible to split your attention between managing a small team and writing code.
But you aren't going to improve at either skill set. Those cycles get devoured by context switching.
Tech lead managers ("TLMs") are a mistake we make over and over in this industry. I've written about this a bit, but the definitive post was written by @Lethain.
My coworker @suchwinston wrote a terrific piece on burnout before the break:
There's a reason why burnout and work/life balance are such evergreen topics, and it's not actually because the world is so terribly harsh and everyone is criminally overworked.honeycomb.io/blog/product-m…
Just to be clear: some places *are* awful, and some people *are* criminally overworked. But burnout and work/life balance are an issue for everyone, not just those people.
I think this is bc there is no real "solution". Each of us has to find and maintain our own equilibrium.
It takes a lot of hard work to become good at technology, and a lot more hard work to maintain your edge in a fast-changing industry.
I don't know of anyone for whom this is _easy_. None of this is remotely natural, from an evolutionary perspective. 🐒
This is an astute point. For all the ink that has been spilled about what observability is or is not, or how generation 2.0 differs from 1.0, it's actually quite simple.
"Observability" was coined to denote the emergence of ✨high cardinality✨ support in telemetry and tooling.
Cardinality, for those new to my feed 🤣 refers to the number of unique items in a set. Gender drop-down with three options? Low cardinality. Gender field you can write to? Much, much higher cardinality.
Metrics can't do high cardinality data. A metric can only be a number.
Logs *can* handle high cardinality data, which is why logs have always been so much more powerful than metrics.
The most useful debugging data is always the high cardinality shit. Request IDs, uncommon strings, whatever. It reduces the search space fast.