Charity Majors
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab. Co-author of "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering". Writes at charity.wtf about on-call, hierarchy, hiring and the engineer/manager pendulum.
Charity Majors did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Our reading
Team output is still what matters, however hard the industry pushes to measure individual output.
Their wordsI also believe that, you know, there's been this whole push towards individual output, but teams are still what matter. Teams output.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 1st of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsWe can go fast. Let's do same thing faster, you know, just boom. And I've come to feel like that is a very immature description of what better is.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 2nd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd it wasn't actually the models. It was the harnesses. It was all the tooling.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 3rd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsWhat I was saying in that piece though was, I think we were right to be skeptical that time. But now, I see the same thing playing out with would you be willing to ship it some code you didn't read? There's no point in arguing about if it will happen or when it will happen. Talk about what it would take.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 4th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsI mean, if you if you think about it, you could generate 10,000 variants of a function faster than you could write it once.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 5th of 26 in this recording
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code generationsoftware quality
Their wordsLike that just does not seem like the ideal artifact. We should be able to store them somewhere. We should be able to have architecture diagrams that we can review and discuss that generate that code to spec.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsit's always weird to me just how much software engineers really seem to believe that the world exists in the repo. It doesn't. It's production, you know?
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 7th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsProduction is not what happens after development. It is a stage of development.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 8th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAs soon as you merge, it should be going out. You like you should have to stop the train to make your code not go into production as soon as you've merged.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 9th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's like they have all the wisdom of their most senior engineers looking at every single diff and that is fantastic. Which means that you don't have to worry about remembering and looking and nitpicking and all the things that we're not good at anyway
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 10th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsOkay, if I'm not going to read this code, how do I know it's going to perform within boundaries of the last code that I generated? That is conformance testing.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 11th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you're debiting from this trust account in the creation of the code, it has to get built up somewhere else.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 12th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAnother another thing we point out is just there is no human in the loop. You own the loop. The loop is yours. The loop is mine. It would not exist if it was not for me. So I am the owner, right?
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 13th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsHere's a baseline. Uh you cannot send anyone something you haven't read. And in fact, if it would take them longer to read it than it took you to make it, it's probably slop.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 14th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsYou can use AI as a shortcut to help you not have to think too much. And you can use AI to help you think more deeply and more rigorously. And both of those use cases have their place. But when it comes to your core job function, we primarily want the second one, right?
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 15th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsSee, the problem is that neither side is making it up. Like they are seeing really scary trends.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 16th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsOne of the things that's ironic though is that both of these sides feel like they are the tiny minority and they're outmanned and they're being suppressed and they are standing up for what is truth and valor in the face of the big AI folks or the big skeptics.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 17th of 26 in this recording
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Our reading
An account of an AI win is not worth publishing unless it is coupled with what that win cost.
Their wordsIt's like we need to hear the wins. We need to hear what's We need to hear about what's possible. We need to hear what's exciting. But you got to couple it with the costs.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 18th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsSoftware is made of logic and language. AI is made of logic and language. And because of that, we can bake in guardrails.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 19th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I have decided not to sink anymore because writing is thinking on paper. And there's no shortcut for doing that thinking.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 20th of 26 in this recording
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Our reading
You cannot really understand the code you write unless you are also the one operating it.
Their wordsThat was always a bad idea because it's split brain. Half of you are writing the code and the other half are understanding it. I would argue that you can't really understand the code you write unless you're operating it.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 21st of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsBut I also think that in my mind, 20 years of DevOps was really about one thing. Trying to create one feedback loop that connected people writing code to that code in production. And it failed.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 22nd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAuto instrumentation has gotten so good in recent years. If you're using Open Telemetry and everyone should be using Open Telemetry. All of the common patterns like all of the models are trained on them. So, it is literally faster and easier to build with instrumentation than to than not to.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 23rd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsIf we don't do it ourselves, meaning hold ourselves to a high standard, build with efficiency, constantly be like trying to get better, if we don't do it ourselves, someone will come and do it to us.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 24th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsit's it's not enough to be a good person. I believe that people who are kind and care about people can and and usually do do better than sociopaths in the same roles, but only if they're good at business.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 25th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsThe hardest thing about quantifying the value of junior engineers is that we don't know how to quantify the value of any engineer. So it's all vibes.
↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 26th of 26 in this recording
- 20 months earlier
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Our reading
"Hire great people and get out of their way" is dangerous advice for anyone in a leadership role.
Their wordsEarlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role.
↗“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf 1st of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsYou should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
↗“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf 2nd of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsEither can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.
↗“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf 3rd of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsCan you be calibrated as an interviewer on every single opening, for every role? My God, no, not even close.
↗“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf 4th of 8 in this piece