alt Hacker NewsThis 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort).
We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences.
Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle. If the engineers would just think for a second, push back on Claude, even Claude would tell them this is bad. But they don't... Platform engineering is now 10x harder with terrible engineers and unlimited code machines.
Don't even get me started on ffmpeg usage, engineers act like the resources are unlimited.
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Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!
> We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences.
Sometimes this can be a death by a thousand cuts. Any individual change may not impact performance to a noticeable degree but when they're pumping out a 10x increase in commits it can be a slow decline.
Just look at how they're merging ~300 commits a week into bun.
That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus.
Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity.
O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything else is a matter of adding more compute, which we will pay with revenue!
A hackathon for performance improvement screams to me "you'll be re-interviewing for your own job." I don't foresee this going well for the company. Best case scenario: you wildfire churn all the chaff engineers which limits the company's throughput until they're rehired... with no expectation the new hires will be any better. You also lose A LOT of domain experience and are self-inflicting brain drain.
I'd try and push for some "lunch and learn" meeting where the engineers get lunch catered and in exchange sit in on a meeting where you explain your point of view. Without monetary incentive it'll be hard to change the culture, but not impossible (and food goes a long way in greasing the wheels).
If your company has sketchy process and minimal checks on the software quality, of course it naturally follows that they hire bad engineers as well. fortunately, that also opens up an opportunity to be a emergency leader with an eye towards promotion.
Do you have SLO/SLAs defined? Are you monitoring performance? CPU usage? Cost increases?
You should have plenty of data to review regularly and push back on any teams that are causing problems. That's a process problem and you need a process for it.
Trace the increase back to specific deployments, call out those teams, and make them fix their shit.
The handling of backpressure is such a good example to distinguish bad from good engineering. A good implementation even presents all the typical "clean" code indicators: DRY, KISS etc.
Mind sharing where you're at?
This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.
When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on.
He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 minutes where he had them stand inside a hot aisle that he was just outside of, giving a fantastic soliloquy on the importance of code efficiency, and the consequences of ignoring it. It was hilarious to watch from the comfort of the cold aisle, knowing full well what he was doing.