Why Johnny Can't Code Good [video]
It&#x27;s really unfortunate that this is what&#x27;s passing the bar as a non-technical talk at &#x2F;\C. Some of the LC talks are given by brilliant people, but talks like this make me think they&#x27;ve got a very weak review process for management talks or business talks.<p>After watching it and taking some notes, the biggest problem with this talk is that he loads a bunch of untrue and unfair garbage up front to pander to the local culture of dismissive shitbirding on everyone else outside of the room.<p>Skip to 22m in to skip all the predictable Chris-Allen-makes-fun-of-everyone preamble and get to the meat of his talk, the substance of which I agree with.<p>For those who can&#x27;t stomach it even at 3x speed the way I just powered through, I&#x27;ve got a summary:<p>- Businesses make bad decisions about the longevity or sustainability of their business practice. They&#x27;re compose of directors and VPs trying to work on a quarterly OKR schedules for wins to justify their outrageous 200k-250k salary options, so it&#x27;s a vicious and competitive environment.<p>- Businesses then try and skip the part about building a sustainable tech org by appealing to, &quot;We hire the best.&quot; This is expecting great engineers to parachute in from Valhalla to go to war for you. It&#x27;s unrealistic.<p>- Between this style of technical evaluation and absurdly fast product cadences (all free of consequence, no liability expressed or implied), organizations don&#x27;t feel they need to care too hard about building deep skill in anything but their most core business interest because most of the work is &quot;trivial&quot; (and to his credit, Chris includes a lot of his own work in this).<p>- Businesses could actually improve infrastructure to eliminate this trivial work, but this requires more sophisticated tools, techniques and designs and these are considered risky.<p>- This is then used as a justification to remove all technical mentorship and tutelage from the system and only hire specialists.<p>- And then the industry forms a tight orbit around tools and practices that are deleterious to anything but a short-turnover org like the modern Google.<p>And for the record, Chris is one of those folks in the community who&#x27;s made a reputation for being dismissive and cantankerous. It&#x27;s his natural personality to make even good and insightful points like this hard to watch.<p>It&#x27;s too bad the lambdaconf folks didn&#x27;t give him feedback to just cut his talk in half. If he had started at 22m it would have been a HELL of a talk. Instead he needs to erect an effigy and shove it in a wicker man with bees to appease his (and perhaps his audience&#x27;s, given the laughter?) love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge.