You can be a great hobbyist engineer and a terrible production engineer.
- You can be a great hobbyist engineer and a terrible production engineer.
- A hobbyist engineer just needs to find something scrappy that works.
- It doesn't matter how it works, just that it works.
- But a production engineer needs to find something that is maintainable.
- That multiple people can collaborate on and fix bugs in, even when things are on fire.
- That can scale and be explainable.
- The things that make production engineering hard are of a totally different character from the things that make hobbyist engineering hard in the first place.
- Production engineering layers a whole new skill on top of that base.
- One that is mostly honed from direct, hands on experience of actually working with other people on production software.