Comments by "Daniel Sandberg" (@ddanielsandberg) on "Platform Engineering Is The New Kid On The Block" video.

  1. The problem is that you end up with developers that has no clue how their things actually works in the real world so they can't make informed decisions, or even know who to ask the right questions. How do you expect to grow seniors, innovate and be competitive when you have devs that has no clue about CI/CD, TDD/BDD, observability, operability or how their decisions affects the system in production and are stuck with the some kind of "I write code, then magic happen" culture? While a good developer-friendly platform is a good thing, it should be there to help with the everyday BAU work and add constraints (governance and compliance). It shall not be an excuse to "dumb it down for developers". An anti-pattern I see all the time is seniors "controlling" and doing "programming by remote control" with an attitude of "I must review everything because I'm the senior". So many organizations hire juniors to just fill a seat and expects them to be productive and because of all the new people they try to control the work with processes and the aforementioned programming by remote control, not (wanting to) understand that for every junior developers they add they are actually removing a senior developer for the next six months. Because that is the job of seniors - to mentor and coach so that the new people *can* be a trusted productive member of the team. An organization with senior devs that does not understand these "sociological" things is not a good place to be. I don't care if they have been doing it for 20 years and can write the most beautiful code ever written; if these things are alien to them they are *not* seniors (you'd be surprised how common this is). The primary job of a senior engineer is to create more senior engineers.
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