Some time last year I started a company-wide email conversation about an article by Tim Bray:
But Should I Code? Seriously, it’s reasonable to ask that question at this stage of my career. It’s a conversation that arose at both of my last two jobs, Amazon and Google. Should your most senior engineers, the ones with decades of experience and coding triumphs and tragedies under their belts, actually invest their time in grinding out semicolons and unit tests? Or do you get more leverage out of them with mentoring, designing systems and reviewing others’ designs, code reviews, and being the bridge between businesspeople and geeks?
The discussion was characteristically vibrant and led Red Hat’s marketing team to reach out to me and a few others to participate in the inaugural episode of their new podcast, Compiler. These are some of the same folks who brought us the excellent Command Line Heroes podcast which I recommmend. The team was really fun to work with and I had a good time recording. It was a 1:1 affair and it was really neat hearing the final product and how they weaved together conversations with other Red Hatters into a coherent narrative.
If you’d like, here’s the episode page which has all the relevant information as well as an inline player.