I'm working with an intern who's implementing a "proof-of-concept" for voice control using both Alexa and API.AI (Google). He's a CS freshman. It's amazing what he's gotten working so far, but his code is unreadable noise. Like he never learned what a subroutine is for.
But he's giving a demo to the CEO today, and said CEO will undoubtedly say "Nice, finish it and let's ship!" when it's probably not even usable code in any way. The hard part -- connecting thousands of users through a db and thousands of persistent cloud connections from individual IoT devices, hasn't even been sketched yet.
So he looks like the hero (with a demo that does something amazing), and I'm going to look like the can't-get-it-done idiot because no one in the organization understands the complexity of going from that proof-of-concept to a working product, or even a next-level demo that uses actual connections from actual devices.
Of course, that's when you're supposed to quit, I guess.
Funny, I've always thought the hardest thing about being an engineering manager is that by default all software engineers think they automatically know way more about everything than their management.
Maybe they just know way more about software development than the engineering manager if said engineering manager has never done actual software development.
Of course both viewpoints are valid, I'm just really feeling the commenter's point today because of my particular circumstance.
