Here's the thing: when I see people spend all their time on design discussions and documents, their work isn't any better for it. Usually it's worse. The documents are not clear or helpful. The designs encoded therein are not better than the first pass knee-jerk thought. The points raised in reviews are just bikeshedding. The process encourages explosion of complexity, making mountains of molehills, and sometimes can be a refuge for people who don't actually have the skills to hide out in. I
do very much respect when someone can plop down some working code this afternoon vs. organize an 8-person kickoff meeting next week.
If it's a genuinely large project, the working code is a skeleton POC, and we can run a design process using what we learned from it. But most of the time it's not, and that engineer has saved us collectively hundreds of hours of waste talking to death something that just isn't that hard.
I think one of the critical senior engineer skills is having correct intuitions about how much time and energy should be sunk on a particular task. Sometimes that means asking people to slow down, collaborate, and think. Equally often, it means asking them to put down the calendar invites, make a choice, and bang something out. We have this bizarre cost model where code is expensive and meetings are free; nothing could be further from the truth.
If it's a genuinely large project, the working code is a skeleton POC, and we can run a design process using what we learned from it. But most of the time it's not, and that engineer has saved us collectively hundreds of hours of waste talking to death something that just isn't that hard.
I think one of the critical senior engineer skills is having correct intuitions about how much time and energy should be sunk on a particular task. Sometimes that means asking people to slow down, collaborate, and think. Equally often, it means asking them to put down the calendar invites, make a choice, and bang something out. We have this bizarre cost model where code is expensive and meetings are free; nothing could be further from the truth.