Abstract As A Verb

The New Stack has an interview with me on various topics here.

I think the following part of the interview gets at what I think is an under-investigated bit of language and meaning:

TNS: At the same time, I imagine that you’ve abstracted a lot of the supporting infrastructure away from the engineer. They don’t have to worry about the particular configuration of the supporting stack?

JA: Yes and no. And I think it really is a common expectation – that abstracting away. The difference is, are you abstracting away so that you truly can say “I don’t have to worry about this”? Or are you abstracting away because you’re aware of those guts, but want to focus your attention right now in this area. That is what we’re looking for.

Post-mortem debriefings every day are littered with the artifacts of people insisting, the second before an outage, that “I don’t have to care about that.”

If “abstracting away” is nothing for you but a euphemism for “Not my job,” “I don’t care about that,” or “I’m not interested in that,” I think Etsy might not be the place for you. Because when things break, when things don’t behave the way they’re expected to, you can’t hold up your arms and say “Not my problem.” That’s what I could call “covering your ass” engineering, and it may work at other companies, but it doesn’t work here.

And the ironic part is that we find, in reality, engineers are more than willing to want to know. I’ve never heard an engineer not wanting to know more about networking. I’ve never heard an engineer wanting to say “You know what, I don’t want to care about database schema design.” And so if the reality is that people do care, then it’s kind of a waste of time to pretend that we’re “abstracting away”. Because you’re going to not care up until the absolute second you do, and when you do, that’s all you want to care about.

1 Comment

  1. Joey Gierlach   •  

    Of which wasnt one of the attributes before

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