you never understood every detail of what you were building. There was always code written by others, colleagues, open source libraries, etc. You would depend on that code every day. And now the scale is much bigger.
What I do: I have a mental model of the system and how it works, at different levels of abstraction, in all the ways I think matter. I test that mental model against reality by making the agent proof it's real, looking at the implementation myself and seeing how it behaves in production.
Every day I'm making hundreds of mini risk assessments on what happens if I get a specific assumption wrong. If I'm not comfortable with the risk, I figure out a way to de-risk it. Maybe a slower rollout, maybe I read the code for longer, etc.
It's certainly a different job. As a startup software engineer it doesn't feel against my instincts though
What I do: I have a mental model of the system and how it works, at different levels of abstraction, in all the ways I think matter. I test that mental model against reality by making the agent proof it's real, looking at the implementation myself and seeing how it behaves in production.
Every day I'm making hundreds of mini risk assessments on what happens if I get a specific assumption wrong. If I'm not comfortable with the risk, I figure out a way to de-risk it. Maybe a slower rollout, maybe I read the code for longer, etc.
It's certainly a different job. As a startup software engineer it doesn't feel against my instincts though