As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue.

The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse.

I had a _very hard time_ making sense of the questions, as I indeed relied heavily on a model to produce these integrations (extremely boring job + external thick specs provided).

I'm still positive these would have simply not happened in a 10x the time if I did not use models, however, I'm now carefuly considering re-documenting the "ohhs" and "aahs" of these so that these kind of uncomfortable moments never happen again.

I haven't felt so clueless and embarassed in a meeting, ever. All I could say was "I'll get back to you on that one, and that one, and this one".

Cognitive debt is very real, and it hurts worse than technical debt on a personal level! Tech debt is shared across the team, cognitive debt is personal, and when you're the guy that built the thing, you should know better!

To be continued... But from now on, the work isn't done if I don't get a little 5 mins flash-card type markdown list of "what is this" and "what is that", type glossary.

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josephg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins".

This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly.

If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"

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ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other.

Off topic, but this must be a USA-specific problem, where prescription drugs are actually marketed at Joe consumer. I think there is maybe one other country where this insane practice is allowed. Nowhere else are patients told to “Ask your doctor about Procrapin for your irritable bowl syndrome!!”

	▲	bigthymer 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		While prescription drug marketing to consumers is an issue in the US, I think the actual problem in this situation is people Googling their issue then coming to the doctor with the conclusion of their investigation instead of letting the doctor do the investigation themselves.

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stingraycharles an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority.

Not just that, but it seems like the grandparent had issues understanding what they were talking about. This is absolutely fine, and they should have just asked to continue explaining more until the problem was fully understood.

It’s obvious your opinion is important, but it’s not worth a lot if you don’t understand what the actual problem is.

Also, I personally don’t like to appeal to authority (not sure if that is what you meant), and instead just use the Socratic method to keep asking questions until they themselves understand the weaknesses. It’s a very friendly way of doing things.

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komali2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture

I think what the OP is saying is that it's the OP's job to know that, and didn't, because they over leverage the LLM.

Like if a doctor was brought in on a cardio consult on their patient because they had a maybe unrelated heart condition, and the only thing they could answer to "why did you prescribe cemidine instead of decimine" is "lemme get back to you on that."

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ryandrake 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place.

"I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

	▲	pkthunder 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not OP, but similar context (~20yr exp.). You absolutely can get away with "I'll need to dig more into this to give you a good answer" but you are _for sure_ expected to have at least some answer ready-to-go. Especially if it's under your purview.
	▲	furyofantares 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The implication is that, in the past, such a meeting would be fine, because they're an expert in what they've authored. It's "hey can you join for 5 minutes" because, in the past, they'd have had deep knowledge off the top of their head of the things they'd committed under their name. But now they're not an expert in the code they've recently committed. Maybe that's OK and expectations need to change, but I'd bet there are a lot of cases where the organization really wants to produce a (code, expert-in-the-code) pair, and should be willing to pay a little time to do that over producing just (code, guy-who-prompted-it).
	▲	WD-42 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don’t think it was made clear: the questions were about the code op “wrote” but they used a llm so couldn’t remember any of it. Probably got there from a git blame. This happens.
	▲	solenoid0937 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		This can happen more or less anywhere if you spend enough time at a company. At some point you'll get pulled into a meeting like this because others think you're in expert in a codebase/area you're not.
	▲	keyle 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Startup life man. Happy to help, just rough sometimes.
	▲	marcosdumay 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		From the way it's written, looks like it's his code that he wrote recently. It's quite common to search for the author of a piece of code to ask questions about that code.

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chaidhat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that in an AI-native company, the people asking the question should be using their own set of the AI to query the codebase, before coming to ask you. The problem that you describe seems to be more relevant to an organization which has not fully embraced AI yet.