The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

Summary

The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability). We can think of this as the just-say-no engineer, as opposed to the just-say-yes engineer. The just-say-yes engineer is obsessed with moving fast, approves code changes by default, values MTTR over MTBF, and tends to ship a lot of code. The just-say-no engineer is obsessed with quality, is happy to move slowly, and blocks code changes by default. Most engineers are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. By “just-say-no engineer”, I’m talking about the group of engineers who most strongly identify with that archetype. The just-say-no engineer is having a hard time in the era of AI. It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to. For the first time in their careers, they’re under a lot of pressure to lower their standards and start saying yes. However, this isn’t because of AI. It’s because of the end of ZIRP. ZIRP and the just-say-no engineer ZIRP, or the “zero interest rate policy”, is a shorthand for the era of software development between 2008 and 2022 when banks were allowing companies to borrow money at near-zero interest rates. During this period, investors were throwing borrowed money at anything, which meant that tech companies were incentivized to constantly hire engineers for low-risk high-reward projects. Successful companies would routinely grow from tens of engineers to thousands, who would go and work on all kinds of things: tangential open-source projects, endless technology migrations, rewrites into other languages, and so on. It was a great time to be a software engineer. We had a lot of bargaining...