by Alan01252 on 4/4/23, 9:18 AM with 6 comments
by Doches on 4/4/23, 9:38 AM
> I've set small projects for my newer engineers to get their teeth stuck into, something they will find rewarding, challenging, and fun.
> But now I have to reconcile that with the thought that I could "just" ask ChatGPT to do it instead
The only way I can find to read that is that the author tends to assign tasks that are mostly writing boilerplate code to junior devs, which, sure, is a perfectly good use of otherwise less-productive junior engineers. It sure as hell isn't something I would agree is "rewarding, challenging, and fun" -- and I can't imagine that the author actually agrees with his own sentiment, either. If GPT can generate it then it wasn't the kind of task that a junior dev would have profited from taking (not much to learn from just tweaking boilerplate!).
Punting work like that to juniors rather than shielding them from it is...pretty much the definition of a bad engineering manager in my book. If nothing else, it's a great way to burn out your junior devs early and/or keep them from learning how to grow into more capable engineers who can handle work that couldn't be done by an LLM.