The Effective Engineer | Edmond Lau | Talks at Google

Engineers do work on new stuff, but also after getting enough expierience how to make new things they may see a time coming to be paid for making improving existing things all unprioritized, bad paid or disliked tasks which did not disturbe in the first place, but after some time making it harder to maintain or changing/adding features than it should be.
Company culture helps in balancing between most liked tasks and necessary quality aspects.

The Q&A section was disappointing. To be fair, the questions being asked were very difficult problems to solve, and which mostly boil down to bad management or flaws in the team's engineering process. E.g. managers constantly pushing for minimum viable products with aggressive deadlines, not allowing for resolution of the inevitable technical debt this incurs, and then eventually hitting a productivity wall where adding more features takes too long due to system complexity and endless support tickets consuming developer time.

Excellent all around, almost. If you say "sort of" one more time

All are good points.

HAHA. I just saw an article about how Google is enacting simplicity steps as a productivity method. 10 bucks says this is a part of their assigned reading, why it has more views than usual and is showing up in the algorithm now? Hey Google, just do better... You guys are probably experiencing a transition in business in which stagnation is the most prevalent threat. Please do not stagnate and keep innovating. you're previous ways of doing things may not work any more. get rid of redundancy. Also, your corporation is probably owned by a rich oligarch that wants to extract as much profit as possible. the simplicity steps most likely will not work.

Nobody drips with workplace trauma like software engineers

Excellent lessons. Applying the engineering mindset of breaking down problems to feature validation (experiment-driven development) was the best take-away for me.

😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

I think it’s too verbose

This talk is more about project management than about engineering

Wondering what reward structure exists for effective engineers? Another thought: what you describe as an "effective" engineer is a pretty good description of the senior engineers who built the original codebase. Of course they are most effective because everyone else has to spend most of their time deciphering that codebase and the weird conventions the senior engineers created. Those senior engineers might be pretty hopeless if you threw them into someone else's small pond. On the other hand, a lot of what you describe as in-effective is the process of building features your marketing team did not correctly prioritize. In the end, what you are saying is a very corporate message: engineers should simply want to improve themselves- it is their fault if a company does not succeed. Coming back to the orginal question.

Imagine working so hard for quora

Do you have a degree.

I don’t agree on infinite scrolling case study since we don’t even know whether assumption is even correct.

My theory is infinite scroll makes tracking back items harder.

Back when Quora was still a startup.

Brilliant. Every engineer needs to here this!