Automated ≠ Autonomous: Developer Productivity and AI | MongoDB’s Tara Hernandez

**Tara Hernandez** (0:00)
And one of my other sayings is, automated does not equal autonomous. And so yeah, if you have automation that goes nuts, it probably is doing the reverse of what you would hope.
I think a lot of what things boil down to actually in our world is, what outcome are you trying to achieve? And really start from there and then work backwards. Because a lot of times you think, oh well, hey, if we had a bot that was like dependent bot, my dependencies around a day go fix, right? But if you multiply that out five times, absolutely, you could get in a situation where it could take three engineers all day long, every day to keep up.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
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**Dan Lines** (1:05)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines, COO and co-founder at Linear B, and I'm delighted to be joined by Cloud curmudgeon, nerd manager, process wonk, and of course, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB, Tara Hernandez. Tara, welcome to the show.

**Tara Hernandez** (1:30)
Hello, I'm glad to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:32)
Totally awesome to have you on today. And of course, we have a crucial topic. It's developer productivity. Very, very popular today in engineering teams, engineering leaders. Everybody's talking about it. And you probably can't talk about developer productivity without talking about AI. So we'll dive into that a bit as well.
And, you know, I'm really, really excited to talk with you. I think you have a great approach to improving efficiency and productivity. And we're going to get into all of that.
How do you think about the problem of increasing developer productivity?

**Tara Hernandez** (2:21)
I want to start with, this is just like the latest name. It's like marketing, branding, right? When I first started, it was like, oh, there's the build and release engineers. And then there was the infrastructure engineers. And then what was this whole platform engineering thing?
And then Google has the whole engineering productivity. And now there's developer productivity. And it's all the same thing, which is there's just going to be a category of people that help their fellow developers do their jobs better, whatever we call it. And DevOps and Agile methodology came out around that. And now we've got the space framework and other forms of new research.
And it's just that the challenge is the industry evolves so fast, right? It went from local computers with floppy disks, and then there was optical media, and then there were the beginnings of the hosted SaaS-based solutions, and now everything is cloud. And so it's really just this constant evolution of how do we support the industry needing to go as fast as it does without the developers losing their minds, right?
The Dora metrics, which is a very popular thing and valuable, I think, it talks about time to deploy and time to restore, and our appetite for that to be as close to zero as possible as an industry for our customers is probably unreasonable now, just how fast we expect things to be. And so I think that's one of the biggest challenges about trying to be an organization supporting the facilitation of software development within that realm is the big challenge.

**Dan Lines** (4:00)
You made me think of a bunch of things there.

**Tara Hernandez** (4:03)
All right. Hit me.

**Dan Lines** (4:04)
And one of them that stood out to me is driving developers a little bit crazy, maybe. I remember that there's all these different movements. And then you said the marketing terms behind them, like, okay, we're doing platform engineering, we're doing DevOps, we're doing agile methodologies, we're doing pair programming, no, we're doing Kanban. We got AI coming, we got bots. We got, it's not exactly the same, but like SRE movements. And then there's like, hey, you're going to be a full stack engineer, we're going to remove QA, everything's going to be automated, you're going to do the QA and you're going to do it.
And right now, I think probably the popular terms that I'm hearing is like the platform engineering, developer experience, AI.
And I'm thinking to myself, is it, do you think it is all the same thing? Like from the beginning of time, it's kind of like, hey, we want to ship code faster. Do you think some of these, like marketing names are like, some of this terminology we're using now, platform engineering, developer experience, AI, do you think it matters? Like is there meaning behind it?