Dangerous Advice for Software Engineers

Summary

I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct production access are in this category: like ssh or kubectl access, a read-write prod SQL console. It’s also possible to give “dangerous advice”. Dangerous advice is dangerous because (like sharp tools) it takes competence and judgment to use well. Giving the wrong person dangerous advice is like giving the wrong person production SQL access - they might go off and do something enormously destructive with it. I give a lot of dangerous advice on this blog. For instance, I advise readers to: I worry about some readers making the wrong decisions about what to work on, or breaking the rules in the wrong way, and so on. I don’t like the idea that I’ve contributed to harming someone’s career. But I think dangerous advice is important to write down somewhere. Most career advice is fake The main reason why is that strong engineers crave dangerous advice, for the same reason they crave sharp tools. Most career advice is fake: written to avoid liability, or to impress people. If you’re serious about getting things done, you’ll end up doing some of these things because they’re obviously helpful. It can be deeply alienating to know things don’t work the way they officially should, but to have nobody to talk about it with. When I was a more junior engineer, I really appreciated the few peers I had who were willing to get real with me (off the record). Managers can’t tell it to you Another reason why is that managers will almost never give you dangerous advice, even if it’s what you need to hear. If a manager tells you to ignore company policy, and you do it wrong - for instance, if you post in Slack that you’re doing it and your manager said it was OK - then that’s bad for them. In fact, it’s much worse for them than it is for you. Tech company leadership often views engineers as useful idiots. Managers are expected to be p...