Thread by @polotek

I had to come back to this after vacation. It's a good thread. I've argued with Oscar about agile principles in the past. But I know he and I look for the same outcomes. We used to work together. It feels like I run into more and more people who aren't impressed with scrum.

https://twitter.com/oscargodson/status/1377005384989245441

Oscar hits on something really important here. But it requires a bit more context. He says "good engineers" know how to adjust scope. Instead I would frame that as a core skill that a good product engineer needs to develop.

https://twitter.com/oscargodson/status/1377005385752584192?s=20

The important pieces of context are these.

I'm using the loose term "product engineer" to describe devs who build products at companies that usually need to iterate and ship new features quickly. There are other kinds of dev jobs where maybe this kind of advice doesn't apply.

More importantly, we really need to shift the way we talk about "good" and "bad" devs. We've had lots of discourse the last few years to help us understand the harm that is enabled by that framing. It's much more constructive to talk about learning and building new skills.

I've been thinking a lot about education lately. On many different levels. I'm on record saying that our industry does a poor job of training the talent that we need. And that's for the obvious skills like coding. We haven't even gotten to a bunch of other stuff.

There are many people out there who still think coding is the job. There are so many other skills that you need to bring to the table in order to be the kind of product engineer that is in high demand. The code is just the baseline.

The fact that we're giving people incomplete information about what the job is, and also not training them, drives a lot of poor outcomes too. Both for tech companies and for the individuals that work for them. No one is being served particularly well.

I would be interested in people doing work in learning and development for professional web engineers. I haven't seen many people focusing on that. But with the right model, I think you could get companies to invest a lot in making their engineers better.