I watched a video recently about the hidden costs of microservices, and it put words to something I've been thinking about for a while. The video walks through the usual pitch - break the monolith apart, give each function its own service, deploy independently.
The last post in this series ended with a line I wanted to come back to: managers - especially first-line managers in more hierarchical orgs - are not always empowered to change the systems they're operating in. They're functions of those systems too.
The last two posts in this series have been about curiosity - what it looks like when people have it and what happens when the environment kills it. A friend responded to the second one with something I've been thinking about since: the framing issue.
A senior engineer on my team is leaving. Not leaving the company - just moving to another group internally. On paper, it's a lateral move that doesn't change much for the rest of us. In practice, it changes a lot.
A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens when companies stop hiring junior engineers and replace them with AI. The argument was straightforward: if you don't hire juniors today, you don't have seniors in five years.
One of my kids has recently graduated with a CS degree. He's been applying for entry-level software engineering positions for months now, and the responses - when there are responses - have not been encouraging.
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about unprompted curiosity - the idea that the engineers who dig into things without being asked are the ones who end up driving direction. I still believe that.