Professionalism

Hey there, it's me again. Did you guys know it's okay to call someone a cunt as long as you don't actually use the word cunt and of course the attack is thinly veiled so you have a modicum of deniability?

So last week I was in this tech community forum where someone asked for some help on organisational posture of shifting-left. I'm pretty well versed in DevOps, so thought I could help.

In the end I don't think I did, but the actual conversation isn't important. A side conversation developed over what shift-left actually is. Again, not that important, but the person directly called me out. I felt they were conflating ideas so I politely told them so.

Now I wasn't joking about being polite. This guy linked a blog that I thought it was mostly incoherent babbling, but as a person who struggles to write themselves, I give a lot of license to an attempt of sharing thoughts. The blog itself wasn't aggressive, nor did it gave me any reason to press this person. I was polite.

But the conversation ended with them dismissing me and then the following quote.

No one can be good at everything.

They've just called me a cunt, right? Actually, they've suggested I was incompetent. But at this point, what's the difference?

Technical discussions

Literally today, I was came across this discussion thread.

Now I don't necessarily disagree and there's nothing particularly egregious here. John Gallagher was entirly cordial during this discussion. In the end he ended the discussion gracefully and I totally respect that.

However, I've had this discussion more than once, and I find it a common theme when people want to micro-optimise the SDLC to their preference, they tend not to consider the larger impact of the kind of assurances the SDLC can provide.

We had a bit of back and foruth where people didn't really get the point, but I remade it, pushed a few buttons and this dropped out.

Now bare in mind I'm cherry picking particular posts from a wider discussion, but this gets pretty spicy.

I was going to say this is not how you do technical discussion, but the sad thing is, this is how most of my technical discussion go.

Now it's totally uncool to straight up call Andrea L. out, eh? Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he was hungry. Maybe he was just fed up of the bloody topic.

Actually, I wish I could tag him so he could come and tell me how wrong I am some more.

Do you think this is how he leads his team?

Anyways, the problem is in the 35 replies:

• It was asserted several times that we should just trust developers with the ability to push direct into production despite me offering two detailed examples of where this trust caused a breach, making this dangerous advice.
• A mitigation was never provided. It was denied that it was required, denied that this was appopriate place, then denied they could share such information publically. I'm not sure what so secretive about code signing though, it's literally a feature of their SCM? Could it be they simply didn't know?
• There was no technical merit to the discussion ( besides from Kristian Thy , thanks bro ). It was a wee bit rude infact. Worse still, and this is actually the reason I'm writing the article, it's completely representative of the "technical discussions" I have all the time in my professional life.

Power Dynamics

I like to punch up. Sometimes across. Rarely down.

A couple of weeks back I heard a story that in a leadership call I created, with leaders I hired, they were discussing diminishing and trying to remove a member of the team because they disagreed with them.

This is extremely dishearting. I really don't want to believe it. But I know the personalities involved, and I know it's likely true. Worse still, I know it probably took a deal of courage to disagree with this particular person, and that the person disagreeing was probably on the right side of the discussion based on merit.

But they're gonna get fucked anyways, because this is what we deem an Engineering Culture in 2024.