CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@ChrisMayLA6 I am really shocked to see Starmer making a valliant attempt to be worse than BoJo or Truss.

It would be interesting to know if he’s succeeded.

@glyph @griotspeak @mcc @mhoye with the “optional” part, at least in pairing, a big part of that is culture.

There’s a shift to be made in a team from “a group of individual contributors” to “we all sink or swim together, and it’s the job of the experienced members to lift up their juniors”.

This is, and again I speak from experience, a very difficult shift. But it makes a massive difference to both morale and productivity.

I’m lucky to work in a team where the senior staff are all of that mindset and we’re able to propagate it to anyone who joins. Honestly, it’s the only reason I’m still here.

But again, you need a bunch of powerful and emotionally intelligent people to set that baseline. And that’s… not guaranteed in engineering teams.

@glyph @griotspeak @mcc @mhoye very much so.

Both mobbing and pairing require emotional intelligence, or at the very least leadership who can ensure that needs are met for everyone.

My personal experience is that mobbing requires exponentially more of both and in some cases just isn’t practical.

@griotspeak @mcc @glyph @mhoye honestly, I love pair programming. I would pair most of the time and ditch asynchronous PRs if given the choice. And part of the issue with mobbing was just plain toxic management.

With pair programming the balance of dynamics is usually such that as long as you have two people working in good faith and a good culture you can usually work it out and be flexible enough for both parties. It’s also easier to pick and choose effective effective relationships.

My experience with extended (as opposed to occasional) mob programming is that it requires actual skills/training and either a specific set of personalities or a lead with strong emotional intelligence in order to bridge the gap. Mobbing is a lot harder to get right and if any team wants to try it for extended periods I whole heartedly recommend getting an experienced coach in.

@griotspeak @mcc @glyph @mhoye

In the job where this was an issue management refused to provide any of that. It was implemented badly, we went straight into chaos with no guidance. We had certain individuals with certain neurodivergent traits who, and as I say this I lay the fault at management and not these individuals, flourished at the expense of the rest of the team. Leadership refused to step in in order to make sure that everyone’s needs were met while still insisting on mobbing.

I can’t speak for the other individuals who got burned out.

@mcc @glyph @mhoye I had that argument with a previous employer over mob programming.

They were trying to make everyone do it, it was burning some of us out.

Their response was “you can just not do it and the rest of the team will do it without you”.

Well, oh Einstein of managers, what do you think is going to happen when all the tools and communication structures the team uses assume mob programming, just like is required to do it properly? It’s not a real option to just not engage. You’ve just forced several of your staff out of a job because it was that or burning them out within weeks, and you’ve managed to paint it as their fault.

Ever since then I’ve been incredibly cynical about any “cultural shifts”. If it’s optional then it’s totally not optional they just don’t want to take the responsibility.

@mcc @glyph @mhoye But yes. One of the contributing factors to the AI issue is that Google Search has been purposely been made worse. Right now the drive to make people use Gemini only doubles down on that incentive.

@jackemled @Adorable_Sergal from the memes that have turned up everywhere it looks like this time it’s a legitimate “I fixed your art!” level of bullshit?

@jaredwhite I have a horrible sneaking feeling that, until if/when there’s a crash, an important skill in this brave new world will be working out which foundation model is being used and then tweaking your CV appropriately

Because all these products _will_ have repeatable and abusable eccentricities

@raganwald @mhoye I remember roughly two weeks into Trump 2.0 when I made predictions he’d pull a stunt like this and got shot down hard by otherwise rational friends saying “there are safe guards in place”.

…

I ask myself at what point the normalcy bias and sane washing will drop, but I fear the answer is “never”. We could be heading into Trump 3.0 and still have the majority of people clinging onto the idea that he’s not an insane autocrat.

@Rycochet @davidgerard a full critique of LLMs also requires a spattering of class consciousness, which tech people as a class have always struggled with

AKA “y’all can see how piping literally everything we do through a single company is going to end badly right? No? Oh. Oh dear.”

@Rycochet @davidgerard Hence the old joke about taking each class of computer science undergrads, locking them in a lecture theatre with a bag of mushrooms and not opening the door until they’ve all had an ego death experience.

@Rycochet @davidgerard LLMs hack your system 1 thinking.

Techies, being people who are highly likely to both consider themselves to be intelligent but also people who are likely to be less self aware or emotionally intelligent, are some of the most vulnerable people you could think of to this sort of trap.

System 1 and System 2 Thinking - The Decision Lab

System 1 thinking is a near-instantaneous thinking process while System 2 thinking is slower and requires more effort.

The Decision Lab (thedecisionlab.com)