How many trips to the well do we have?
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
This week, we're observing Veterans' Day, and will provide a good break in the week.
I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest!
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Things I enjoyed in the past week
Becoming a compiler engineer is a post that reveals what it's like to be a compiler engineer and what it takes to break into the field.
What is special about MCP? It's a good post talking about how MCPs provide nice features to AI agents, but also pollute the context constantly, even if you don't need one for a given session
I've been thinking of that phrase constantly since the start of the pandemic.
As people are laid off, retire, leave after being burned out, and we lose context, domain knowledge, or even things that person would have started if they were still there. As a team, we need to rebuild that context and domain knowledge, while also thinking of ways to mitigate this loss over time.
In times when teams are cut in half or corporate resources are reduced, we can use AI "harder" to compensate for laid-off teammates; however, there's a constant risk that eventually the leak will catch up to you.
That has been the recent commentary in the latest AWS outages, that laying off so many people has finally caught up with them. And while my current team is not at that scale, I constantly think about how many more trips to the well we have ahead of us.
Is it possible to motivate under the current circumstances?
I've been taking the time to talk with people whom I've recognized as being the only owners of a process or particular knowledge. What I've come to realize is that these people are often burned out. Most of the time, the teams they're part of are so small that they're on call very frequently or receive consistent escalations because no one else can take on their knowledge, as the others are in the same situation.
The reasonable path would be to distribute knowledge, but all other members are in the same boat, either owning large domains by themselves or burned out from taking on another job.
Another path forward would be to start building a business case for hiring more people to the team. Those are harder to get approved and might take multiple quarters. If neither is available, what are we going to do? Reasonably, distribute knowledge, but at a slower pace than usual, which doesn't fully mitigate the risk. Other options include automating runbooks that these teammates write, or having someone else document their knowledge by taking notes during calls. Another option would be to discuss this with your closest director or manager of managers to have a peer team provide help with writing runbooks, absorb some operational support, etc.
Your Turn
Are you thinking of knowledge transfer as layoffs become increasingly common in the industry? Have you considered the knowledge lost in recent layoffs at your company? Perhaps your company hasn't had any layoffs, or you're not considering this, which is good! Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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