The Stateless Engineer

During a lunch conversation with my colleagues, the term Stateless Engineer was accidentally bornt.

Imagine a future world where engineers are not defined by the team or product that they work on. Engineers are flexibly organized and re-organized into teams based on their skillsets to solve specific problems or work on products. Engineers are not tied to a fixed team or product for long periods of time. Engineers are not prevented from joining a new team because they do not have necessary context. Context resides not solely with Engineers but is codified in living documentation that is part of the codebase (documentation-as-code, or vice versa). Hence context can be acquired easily and never presents a barrier to entry. These are Stateless Engineers.

The Stateless Engineer concept draws upon the idea of nodes in Docker and pods in Kubernetes, where units can be replaced, added or removed easily. This is not to paint a future world where engineers are replaceable units with a central orchestrator (or totalitarian like 1984 by George Orwell) but rather suggest a new way of organizing teams and engineers, enabled by better ways of codifying context and many of the already existing *-as-code movements. If done right, organic knowledge transfer (if even needed in the first place) may sprout, due to regrouping of engineers.

Of course, all of this is largely fiction for now, but wouldn’t hurt to dream a little, does it?