Written Articles
Deeper reflections about our experience as senior engineers
Some are technical, others are about people or processes. In every one of them, we share lessons from real projects.
- Article5 min readThe power of inflated self-assessmentThe loud colleague who has an opinion on everything, and the engineer who has spent five years inside a control plane and says nothing in the design meeting. Both are misjudging themselves, and a paper by Kruger and Dunning explains the psychological aspect behind their behaviors. Telling somebody they are wrong is not the right intervention. Telling them they are experts does not make them experts. Training them is the right intervention and the right path to make them experts.
- Article7 min readThe shutdown plan is seven years oldA legacy ecommerce core was scheduled for shutdown in 2019 and has more systems depending on it now than it had then. Three replacement projects put it there. Outlived three CIOs, one office move, and a vendor that is not reachable. The cost of keeping it is growing, split across ten cost centres, and attributable to nobody. The cost of removing it requires one owner and one budget line, but yet, the legacy runs today.
