FartyMcFarter

GCP has grown a lot.

"You are a distinguished engineer..."

> It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done.

That makes sense - I don't know if that's what the blog post was implying though. Ironically, this blog post could probably benefit from a few more details about what the meeting was supposed to achieve :)

> If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details.

I should have been clearer.

When I said that good leaders pay attention to things from the bottom-up, that doesn't mean they always know everything needed for any discussion. It just means they are able and keen to understand the low-level details when they matter, because they routinely look at such details in the projects that they're involved in.

Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.

> I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.

How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?

> Then I realised that "I don't want the details" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".

Something about this feels wrong:

- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.

- If you don't trust them completely, how can you know if "what happens next" is appropriate without knowing the details?

Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that leadership doesn't need to have their feet on the ground?

The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.

Yep - I immediately thought this was going to be some "Python SWE on the cloud for hire" service.

That will show'em.

If that's the case, that makes me much less sympathetic, even though I can understand how it's very disturbing to see the field suddenly changing like this.

I think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way:

- it teaches resiliency in bad situations.

- it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it.

The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too.

To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.

Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).

Surely input tokens are also involved, and not necessarily only for the initial prompt if there are feedback loops or agent interactions.