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Comment by shpxnvz | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this happen once, and I can almost understand why it did. In this case there was a rather severe production problem that had potential long term revenue effects for the company.

In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme.

They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.

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Given that you've anonymized the company, can you share the theme from which the 'whimsical' names were drawn?

(I'm curious as to what seemed so out-of-place in a serious action report. Mythological gods seem like they'd be OK... but maybe Seven Dwarves or Deadly Sins or Slang Drug Terms would be embarrassing?)

Pokémon :)

It was too long ago to remember what the specific name was that triggered the reaction, but I believe one cluster was named after characters from the X-Men comics, and another used Tolkien characters. There were others as well that I can't remember, but none were particularly controversial or objectionable, so far as I know.

Yup. It's amazing how uptight some suits can get about cartoon names and other whimsical machine names. At my work I had some lab servers named after Pixar characters. I got seriously chewed out by one C-level exec about the inappropriateness of the hostname "elastigirl". :-(

Even if you want "safe" sanitized names though, I can't understand why people create these elaborate multi-part naming conventions for servers. Seriously, if the hostname is harder to remember and type than the IP address, YOUR NAMING CONVENTION IS BROKEN!

... and this is why I absolutely oppose letting non-engineering-background people run a company. You really have to have been in the trenches yourself to be qualified to manage those who are.

This was a failure on the part of the executives in doing their jobs. It doesn't take an engineer to recognize that they needn't be concerned with machine names (unless the names were so bad that public disclosure would result in a PR nightmare).

Nice in theory, but it's just not possible for every single person to be an engineer, and yet every single company has IT.

The danger is when managers think of themselves as engineers.

Or when engineers think they are the best qualified managers...only because they are engineers.

Good point - though I was specifically thinking about tech startups/companies in general. I've long since given up on working for companies whose bread and butter does not revolve around my work (e.g. IT departments at non-tech companies)... it's a recipe for abuse precisely for the reasons as mentioned above.

Yeah, I absolutely would never take a job at a huge company whose core wasn't tech. On the other hand though, I think most tech startups are chasing the hard money. I'd be very keen on joining an early stage "traditional" business in an established market and use technology to gain a competitive advantage. The trick would be that the founders would have to either include me (tough because I don't have any experience or contacts in any of these industries) or they would have to recognize the value I bring with proper incentives (tough because traditional business people who understand the effect of user experience on sales will probably go to an overpriced agency because it's a lot easier and reliable than finding real talent to bring in-house).

Or have non-engineering people willing to listen to their employees.

Sometimes I wonder about people who are born and bred as future "management material". Do these people have more experience in thinking than someone who writes programs all day, mentally modeling the potential effect of every new line of code? Or someone who works all day crafting a piece of machinery, or sculpting statues, transforming a blank block of material into something useful and beautiful?

Somehow I just don't have that much respect for people who've gotten where they are by duping professors and wowing everyone with some impressive degree or family pedigree. It's not the same.

For any manager to be worth their salt to me, they have to demonstrate that they've had a lot of good old-fashioned practice in thinking. And the management fast-track just doesn't portend that to me. And I think that's why most companies > 50 employees slowly crumble as their engineers and other thinkers are crowded out by MBAs.

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