How I use ChatGPT as an engineering leader

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And I may be able to beat ChatGPT in a game of tic-tac-toe (they rarely play by the rules, after all), but let’s be honest - ChatGPT has a lot more knowledge than I do, and I want to leverage it as much as I can in my day-to-day.

There are a lot of articles on how engineers can leverage ChatGPT (you know how it goes - ChatGPT is your own personal junior engineer so you spend less time writing code and more time QAing it), but I want to give my perspective on using it as an engineering leader.

Let me preface this by saying ChatGPT should not be treated as gospel when you’re using it as a leader or manager of any sort; combining the human element with the vast sea of knowledge ChatGPT brings is key, but you’re responsible for that human element.

Structuring interview questions. Whenever I need to hire for a new role or a role I haven’t interviewed for recently, I always jump to ChatGPT to make sure I’m covering all bases for a thorough interview. For example, I hadn’t interviewed any QA Engineers in a long while so I popped over to ChatGPT to ask for a typical interview format for QA Engineers at the Hiring Manager level. I then took the suggested format and questions and added in my own.

Writing SQL queries. For someone who writes a lot of SQL on the daily, I don’t really know that much SQL. ChatGPT has saved me numerous times when I need to write complex queries. One of my favorite recent examples was utilizing ChatGPT to help me write a bucketing query to break down why our cloud costs were skyrocketing seemingly out of nowhere and overnight.

Creating job descriptions. Similar to interview questions, I have heavily used ChatGPT to help me write job descriptions. It’s imperative to change the voice to the same format as the rest of our job descriptions, but where it really shines is on identifying technologies and typical day-to-day tasks. This is likely something I’ll continue to do.

Having an AI mentor and brainstorming partner. Nothing will replace having an actual mentor, of course, but ChatGPT is super helpful for talking through dicey situations on a whim - anywhere from personnel issues to “how does this technology work” to “help me frame this business idea to make a stronger point.” This is what I would assume to be the table stakes reason to use ChatGPT.

Creating document templates. In the past 6 months I have used ChatGPT to create several templates for me to use as starting points for work. For example, I wanted to update our RCA template so I had ChatGPT create one for me and then adjusted ours to add a few pertinent sections.

Drafting emails—especially when I need to be stern. You know; fewer exclamation points, a stronger voice. I will often run an email through ChatGPT when I need to make sure I am coming across as strongly as I need to, and it has actually helped me become a better writer as a result.

Looking up error messages. The number of times I’ve been troubleshooting an escalation ticket and see an error message and say to myself, “what the hell does this mean?” More times than not ChatGPT can tell me what it is and how to fix it.