MD’s email was funny .. she has to spell out the “distinguished engineer” will write code.
The copilot adoption is failing cause nobody’s is writing code in Nike!
Nike was and always be a consultant driven company … have some pie in the sky ideas .. get the consultants to write the code and then ask FTEs to baby sit the code for their tenure!
Plus, so much for flattening the org structure.. there are still layers and layers of VPs reporting to each other !
You
@1tqw+1rfR65Eo hits the nail on the head with the state of "Software Engineering" at NIKE. I would call myself middle of the road at best and it is shocking how code illiterate a lot of people are. I'm not asking for people who can do a series of nonsense LC Hard questions here, our product is retail not tech, but it's an embarrassment how many "Software engineers" can't even set up an IDE on their own.
The contractors and consultants aren't helping either. Most of the full-time ones are hired from that batch and NIKE always takes the lowest bidder.
Said DE does a fair bit of coding. I know he was working on Databrick components. I don't really see him being useful at a VP lapdog though
Yeah the bit about the special personal technical advisor also coding was an unnecessary detail. First off, said DE did not code. Even if he did it was not productionized. So yeah, it is a huge step up for said DE....but it is wrapped in a few layers of BS....I'd much rather do without
You people are an embarrassment. Crying dinosaurs.
Nike knows they hire garbage engineers and hence they need consultants to come and do the projects. To get anything done here you have to go through atleast 6 levels of management plus tpm!
It’s not about whether copilot is good or bad! It’s a development environment helper … the fact of the matter is .. the engineers or the DS are not actually coding .. they are maintaining tiny pieces of code which they copy paste more to add more functionalities like geo support .. in the last entire year that I have been at Nike .. I have not met a competent engineer ! It gets worse as the number of years in their Nike tenure increases! People spend time in kingdom building than actually adding value. And few pockets of Nike who are actually doing some good work are riddled by vp level politics ! There is no end to this … if you think you are a competent engineer .. stay away from this nonsense place !
CoPilot is a contextual search engine in your editor, and it is amazing at being that. It can also do some simple tasks that are tedious. Where it really shines is in people working with relatively simple things that they don't use in their day to day job as often. If you primarily write backend code but need to transfer files to an s3 bucket, or poll a message queue, instead of digging through manuals or searching online for something you might only do once a quarter or year, you can just let copilot show you. It's also really good at rapidly prototyping an idea. It is by no means going to replace developers, but make their jobs a bit easier. People didn't throw this big hissy fit when IDE's started offering auto-completion did they?
Copilot is a hammer looking for a nail.
There are two groups that love it regardless of reality.
Basic comprehension & quantity of written word have NEVER been a limiting factor in software development. Nerds love mechanical keyboards because we’re autistic, not because words-per-minute is the driving factor of our work.
What IS a limiting factor is micromanagement and dysfunctional organizations. I currently have 5 “dotted line” bosses because of how insanely matrixed every department in this company is.
Categories make no sense for tech. Geo’s make sense but the org structure was setup by people that struggle to open an excel file, let alone know enough to setup team trees that can reuse & share components without getting in each others way.
The other limiting factor is bloat on the ground floor. This generation of ELT hired quantity instead of quality. Now I’ve got to teach programming 101 every Friday to people that should never have gotten through the first stage of an interview.
Guess what. Copilot isn’t going to save them from cluelessly throwing a wrench in the server’s multithreading or resource provisioning. But it will help them throw more wrenches than I can catch.
From the ELT that brought you “our AWS costs are too high so we hired thousands of unqualified offshore contractors… now that problem is 1000x worse”
this season they’re now bringing “we fired the expensive qualified engineers & gave a bug-writing machine g-n to anyone left that was willing to work for a bag of rice… what do you mean productivity is at record lows?”
MD gave Lance Armstrong a set of training wheels and is now complaining that an oversold tool isn’t valuable to a professional.
This trial has told us everything we need to know about LLMs in an applied setting.
I think the code part was added on because being on her leadership team as an advisor makes it seem like he'll be removed from the day to day.
And frankly, principals, architects and distinguished engineers often have to struggle to stay in the coding loop. They're generally not getting stories assigned to them in scrum meetings ... nor should they be.
haven't you learned already that Nike is not about backing the story they sell, it's about perception of how the story sounds? What happens in the background usually isn't aligned