I thought this was going to be an article about slacking off with style

Agreed. A better framing would be "defining work".

In their defence, requirements engineering sounds somehow reactive to me, while "this thing" is kind of proactive, for what it's worth.

It was clearly a "tongue-in-cheek" framing. Got me interested at least!

I was thinking the same thing. The word that I would be more inclined to use is used multiple times throughout the article. Discovery.

I think it's a fundamental difference in philosophy. Does the work exist, and you discover it? Or does it start existing as soon as you think about it? This person seems to subscribe to the latter world view.

yeah I thought the post was going to be satirical

Requirements engineering still applies to senior engineers. You are given a problem and you need to work out the requirements and the path to completion.

But for staff engineers, they need to to discover the scope themselves. That's where "inventing" coming from. Not saying inventing is a good word here, but requirement alone is not enough for staff level's work

> "Inventing work" is a strange phrase

The author used an LLM. The first paragraph has two em dashes (turned into hyphens) and a typical overlong list. The second paragraph has an em dash the human author turned into a semicolon, and the third has one he turned into a colon. The fourth paragraph does the colon substitution several times.

The fifth paragraph is so obviously machine-generated I don't understand why people are even discussing this blog post at all:

This is the other cost - invisible to many, sometimes including the ones who handle the toil work. Every team has toil, and it is almost never prioritized. But you already knew this one, so I won’t spend more words to say that toil is an important signal that there is work waiting to be discovered.

If all you want to do is post prompt outputs on your blog, I think a) you should be honest about it and b) you have an obligation to write very interesting prompts.

Might even be more useful to just share those.