Tag: technical judgment

As code becomes cheaper to produce, unowned complexity becomes more expensive. This essay grounds that claim in the decisions that syntax cannot settle by itself: consistency, retries, ordering, failure recovery, scale, team capability, operating cost, and the expected life of the system. A plausible implementation is not yet an engineering answer because the same feature can require a responsible monolith in one organization and a responsible distributed design in another.

The important qualification is that judgment is not a uniquely human property that engineers can claim without evidence. Agents can propose architectures and ask useful questions, while people routinely make shallow decisions or preserve bad conventions. The durable boundary is therefore process, not species: record why a tradeoff was chosen, expose assumptions, work in reviewable increments, test failure modes, and keep a named owner accountable for the result. AI amplifies whatever discipline already exists. Without those controls it accelerates entropy; with them it can widen the set of options a team can examine before committing to complexity.

A senior data engineer's decade of candid career lessons — job mobility, technology stacks, management dynamics, and data-engineering-specific realities — delivered in a deliberately irreverent tone.

The value isn't novelty; it's calibration. The framing strips out the polish that makes most career advice easy to agree with and harder to actually use.

Loose title, useful theme. Senior engineering is less about cleverness and more about judgment, communication, taste, scope control, and knowing where complexity will hurt later.

Keeping this because it fits the thread running through the site: the work is technical, but the leverage often comes from deciding what not to build and how to make the consequences visible.