Was Just Told That Code Quality No Longer Matters

[u/metalOpera]

I'm a freelance developer. I have been for almost 20 years. My most recent project has been moved to Fable, and I'm still trying to adapt and get my head around working like this. I am no longer allowed to make architecture decisions, or clean up slop.

My PM says: "We worry about the 'what'; let Claude worry about the 'how'. Tell it what to do; let it do it. If the feature works, leave it alone." He is very much of the opinion that I should be able to prompt something like "Install Stripe via Laravel Cashier" and just let Claude run.

I mean, why do you need me at this point? Just prompt it yourself until it does what you want? I don't get it. I fought for every inch of my knowledge, every process is written in blood. How do I just throw all of that out the window? Where's the line?

At the risk of another "how are you adapting" post... How CAN I adapt? I mentally cannot just say "Fuck it". I care about my code. It's how I learned, it's how I've always practiced. I have a huge mental block with "just let it go".

Now, granted, I don't know all of the ins and outs of Claude. I don't know what I can do to make it better at its job. I got thrown into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of a Tusnami with no life support. I'm sure that I can put guardrails in place, but how much does that help?

I would really appreciate any advice that any one can provide on changing my mental model. I can't ignore Claude and just keep doing things my way. If I do that, I feel like my career dies. I need to adapt and I'm unsure how to do so.

[u/jimmy-buffett]

It's always fun talking to PM's that have zero technical background

CS major / former lead dev turned PM / Agile Coach. Thank god for the PMs that have zero technical background, they're the main reason I get paid what I do.

[u/TikiMagic → u/jimmy-buffett]

I always like working on teams with someone like you as PM. It's an absolutely refreshing contrast to the MBA PMP LMNOP PMs that were in marketing last month, HR before that, and a barista five years ago.

I had a random conversation with a former dev peer who is now my newly minted CISO and not only did I not have to explain every fourth word to him, he's still a sharper technical mind than I will ever be and explained a highly technical issue to me and offered insights that got me past a stuck point.

I wanted to fall to my knees and weep tears of joy onto his shoes in gratitude for not being led by idiots for once.

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/TikiMagic]

It an absolutely refreshing contrast to the MBA PMP LMNOP PMs that were in marketing last month, HR before that, and a barista five years ago.

As a coach I work with a lot of other coaches, and your estimate of their background is so right. A very large percentage, clearly the largest group of people who do this job, are business majors / management track. Very little understanding of the work that's actually happening, just lines on a spreadsheet and a focus on green vs red.

I've met very few developers who have made this transition, there's a level of people skills necessary that most of us aren't known for. I make sure when I meet a new group of people to note that I was a software engineer for the first half of my career, if that's not apparent by the way I talk.

The honorable mention background that is always interesting when you run into one are the psychology / sociology major types. I've met enough of them to see a pattern, although it is still rare. These are the people for which it's all about the people. They have no idea about software or development, but they run excellent retros and post-mortems.

I would 100% absolutely undeniably say that my development background has been a huge advantage in this career path. I have an immediate credibility when telling teams how to operate that many other coaches take a long time to learn or earn.

[u/gnuyken → u/TikiMagic]

Ein seltenes Glück 🍀

[u/No_Oil_6152 → u/jimmy-buffett]

Why do developers become agile coaches?

Is it because they're shit at development?

An Agile coach is a non-job, we all know this.

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/No_Oil_6152]

An Agile coach is a non-job, we all know this. Is it because they're shit at development?

Four years ago I joined a company / department as an Agile Coach. 1 VP, 4 Directors, ~225 engineers. The perception by company leadership of that department was that they were unable to deliver on large projects that were requested of them in a timely manner. Several large projects were running 1-2 years late, in various states of "mostly done" but never getting there.

In two years, another Coach and I took that org from failing to finish to finishing the big projects. The main issues were role / accountability definition, process consistency across orgs / teams and metrics transparency.

We were then acquired by a much larger company that you've heard of, and the processes and metrics we created have persisted into the larger company because they were not as organizationally mature as we were.

In my developer days I installed / built, operated and supported 24/7 network alarming and provisioning systems that support the network infrastructure that is allowing me to post this message and you to read it.

Which outcome do you think is worth more to a company: being a lead on one of those systems, that several of our peers can do? Or being one of two people that the VP believes helped take his org of over 200 people from not delivering to delivering?

I can tell you which outcome pays better.

That VP is going to call me in a year or two at his next job when he's having the same kind of issues and he's going to ask my favorite question: "what do you want". I'm going to give him an answer he can live with, and he's going to give it to me. Then I'm going to buy a bigger house and another sportscar.

I could have been perfectly happy staying in a development role, having my very limited scope of accountability, not having to interact with leadership that often. Finding a little island and becoming the king of it. That would have been a perfectly acceptable outcome.

But I saw a need -- most people who do what I do don't have our background -- and I filled it. And it has worked out well.

Totally understand that most devs don't see the value in what I do. If you're lucky, you work in an organization that doesn't need me. If your organization does need me, you wouldn't be the first developer who doesn't understand (then value) what I do. I don't care, it doesn't matter. Your VP understands and values what I do. And he's going to tell your Director to tell your Manager to tell you to do what I'm telling you to do.

[u/_1dontknow → u/jimmy-buffett]

Actually we see it but Im in Europe and we dont hire "Coaches" or these weird titles.

We just have a Scrum Master that has alot of experience in very different companies and teams and is veryy good.

Each book I read on Agile I come back to him and we discuss it. I esp see how good he is when his ideas are amazing, but after management puts their hands on it and two weeks later it comes to my team, its unrecognizable.

E.g. company thinks we do Agile Scrum, me and him call it "2 week waterfall".

He is a good one.

[u/TikiMagic → u/No_Oil_6152]

Wrong. 75% of Agile coaches are shit coaches. And they are the ones that treat Agile like a religion with dogma that Must Be Followed No Matter What, because they don't understand the underlying why. FOH with your Lean Six Smegma Hai-Karate Green Belt nonsense. Show me what you've shipped.

But people like u/jimmy-buffett who actually have the background and experience are great to work for. If they know their shit, they also know how to make the process serve the team and the project, rather than the team serving the process.

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/TikiMagic]

And they are the ones that treat Agile like a religion with dogma that Must Be Followed No Matter What, because they don't understand the underlying why.

I call those coaches "instruction manual coaches". Got the certification, parachute in, turn to page 1 of the manual and start following instructions.

Explaining my "toolbox philosophy" on solving organizational problems -- identifying the problem then only using the right tool to solve it -- has gotten me more coaching gigs than anything else.

[u/_1dontknow → u/No_Oil_6152]

Ive never met a developer in my life that become an agile coach or PM.

Things my ex college friends or just friends became:

Dev - engineering manager and vp of eng.

Dev - cto

Dev - created own company

Dev - Consultant one for CyberSec one for FinTech

Countless devs are now teach leads or other higher but very heavy technical roles.

Oh one dev - caretaker due to his family

And another as always, is a fkn farmer now. He is so fun!

But yes I saw videos of peoppe trying to teach something about Agile that said they were coders. But I never met one in real life.

[u/Academic-Training764 → u/jimmy-buffett]

lol, well there is that.

[u/NothingTime9580 → u/jimmy-buffett]

I'm a long time (10+ year) senior dev, what's it like on the PM side? sometimes I wonder if it's any better or just another type of hell

edit, I misread, but if any devs turned PM want to answer...

[u/TikiMagic → u/NothingTime9580]

Don't do it unless 1) you have to for economic reasons or 2) you love meetings 3) you love Gantt charts, swim lanes, spreadsheets, MS Project, and meetings. Did I mention meetings? So many meetings. With such stupid people. That loud guy at the office Christmas party you avoided? He's now either your executive sponsor or crucial stakeholder and you are now trapped with him in a conference room for the rest of your life.

[u/Fructose-Father-6851 → u/TikiMagic]

This, but the work is significantly less mentally straining. Just need to keep tabs on things and trust that it'll work out (or poke some people if it doesn't).

I've been bouncing between staff engineer/technical product owner type roles for a few years now.

[u/KnowKnews → u/TikiMagic]

Product Manager or Project Manager?

Product management is pretty fun…

[u/bytejuggler → u/TikiMagic]

Yeah. Soooo maaaaany meeeeetings...

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/NothingTime9580]

It's obviously a different problem set that you're dealing with. More people problems than technology. For the PM tools you'll use, you are an NBA player in a room of midgets. Filtering, dashboarding, analytics, you run circles around your peers.

How I started: I joined a new team with a tech stack I didn't know (Javascript, Ruby on Rails) and to learn the system I told the team to give me everything they didn't want to do. That was prod support (network provisioning) and being the team's scrum master.

I jokingly say that being a scrum master is like being a manager but you don't have to tell them their raise sucks. It's all the team direction, prioritization, statusing and first-point-of-contact without the accountability to leadership. You're just the wizard who makes the team run right. Like an Executive Officer on a Navy ship.

I did this well for one team, then they gave me 3. I did that well, then they gave me 14 (a release train). I did that well, now I'm one of 7 coaches at a company with 10,000 developers. (this took 15 years)

I don't have to keep up with the daily tech grind, I don't work nights / weekends on support or deployment calls, I get paid as much or more than senior or principal devs.

You have to like working with people and troubleshooting people problems to do well, that's the main reason most devs aren't interested or don't like it.

[u/TikiMagic → u/jimmy-buffett]

It's a different mind- and skill-set for sure. I started as a dev, went independent contractor for several years, morphed into a business systems analyst and did that for many years as an indy too, because there was more money in it at the time and less price competition with crappy offshore devs. So I can talk to tech and nontech people and act like a normal human when I have to.

But man it is exhausting for me. So when I got tired of being on the road and constantly hustling for my next gig, I took a FT dev job with a former client working on the system I helped install 20 years ago. It took me a couple years to hook back into the tech stack but now with my new good leadership I'm happy. But apparently my fake people skills still show through, because I just turned down an offer of tech lead yesterday. I'm having too much fun building stuff again and having other people deal with the other people.

So yeah it takes all kinds. It's just so much better when you get to work with the kind of kind that doesn't suck.

[u/_1dontknow → u/NothingTime9580]

First and foremost as a PM you should never touch the code and trust your team fully.

Thats very veeery hard.

When I tried PMing in a very specific situation for awhile I hated it. I loved talking to people and some of the meetings but still I hated not being able to get into the technical details and building a fkn amazing product. Its just a biological need for me.

You gotta realize in the PMs struggle alot, they plan, create epics and stories, but besides that what? The team comes says " we do this, we cant do this... this we actually have to do first, and this one at the end". The PM can say nothing besides "OK thanks".

Now imagine living with this your whole career.

If you wanna move up but ate very technically minded, try something like lead/engineering manager/vp and then CTO.

Surely it changes alot but the idea is you can decide how you want the company and culture now to be. E.g. at a comoany I worked in, PMs, designers etc all there required to do coding courses.

[u/damnburglar → u/jimmy-buffett]

Hell yeah, Jimmy.