Stop DoS-ing Your Own Team
How to Avoid Overwhelming Your Colleagues
DoS (Denial of Service) is an attack that overwhelms a resource or service with a ton of fake or meaningless requests. Imagine a website suddenly getting flooded with so many empty requests that it can't handle the real ones from actual users. It either slows down to a crawl, denies legitimate access, or completely crashes, making it unusable.
You can achieve this in the tech world by setting up a job that repeatedly calls a resource a massive number of times all at once. This pushes the resource past its limits (whether by scaling up or out) and makes it slow down, increasing the time it takes to respond. Eventually, it becomes unusable for real users or even stops responding entirely.
How to DoS Humans:
This attack isn't just for software and servers; it applies to people, too. We all have limited energy and capacity. If you want to "DoS" someone, you essentially flood them with so many requests and tasks that their time and mental capacity are fully occupied. When this happens, they start falling behind on important tasks, can't respond to new requests, and quickly burn out.
How to unintentionally DoS your team:
I bet you're seeing where I'm going with this. DoSing your own team can happen quite easily, even without you realizing it. In the past, common ways to unintentionally overwhelm your teammates included:
Asking your teammates about every little thing before even trying to find the answer yourself.
Scheduling a ridiculous number of unnecessary meetings in the name of "super duper scrum."
Sending really long messages about something that could have been said in just a line or two.
But now, there's a new set of "DoS" attacks emerging, especially with the rise of AI tools:
Submitting Pull Requests that are entirely AI-generated without you even reviewing them properly.
Generating huge, complicated chunks of code that are a nightmare to read, maintain, and review.
Writing long, AI-generated messages that sound professional but totally lack your personal touch and clarity.
These actions can seriously exhaust your team's capacity. They'll perform less, become less tolerant of your future requests, and this negative impact will eventually loop back and affect you too.
Be responsible:
I'm not trying to be a hypocrite here, telling you to stop using AI in your work!. I use AI in my work. My point is to use it responsibly and always keep your hands on the steering wheel. Don't just hand over your brain and judgment to the AI. And most importantly, don't confuse generating more code faster with being truly productive. Productivity is a mix of both quality and quantity. If you lose quality, you are just producing lots of bad code very fast.
Stop DoSing your team and try to use these new powerful tools in the best responsible way you can.