The Sociotechnical Path to High-Performing Teams • Charity Majors • GOTO 2023

[@NeilHighley]

Very good talk. Development is about understanding the system and how to monitor the system. Also, the point about the effect we have on the team versus the effect the team has on us is extremely useful.

[@kalmarnagyandras]

1. AI doesn't solve any people problems, and technical problems are not the challenge. 2. AI/Robots can only take your work, if you're doing a robot's work. 3. Generative AI will also not take your work, because you can't encode intent and "sense" in a model. LLMs just spit out the most probable next word in a sequence.

[@chris.dillon]

She's going to write another book and I will buy it. ❤

[@barneylaurance1865]

This sounds like a very good path. I have a question about the key - given at 17:40 "if it's going to a place where real humans hit, that brings enough chaos to count". What counts as a real human hitting? Specifically does a person doing QA work on your software count as a real human, or do they only count if they're actually using the software as a tool to do something else. My situation is as a developer at a very small organisation where the main thing we do is run time limited annual online fundraising campaigns - and most of our traffic for the entire year comes in one week around the start of December. So it's hard to make sure real humans are hitting our code immediately after any work is done.

[@prdoyle]

I think Honeycomb is somewhat unique in that they are themselves the observability tool. That means they are exactly the thing their own devs use to tell whether their changes are working. They don't need to do any artificial QA work; they just use the tool.

[@barneylaurance1865]

@@prdoyle Right. They make a tool that they also use extensively themselves. Observability isn't the only market where that's possible - e.g. the makers of Slack probably have discussions about how to make it on Slack, the makers of Facebook probably use Workplace by Meta (aka Facebook at Work) a lot, CircleCI probably use their own product. But there are indeed many more products that can't be used much for real by the people making them.

[@simoroshka]

to be honest, judging how good the team is by whether it does continuos deployment to production daily... seems wrong to me. It is not always the best option for a project.