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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

> As yet another data point, the website cannot handle Saturday HN front page traffic. How can "Principal Systems Engineer" meaningfully talk about such complex matters of system design and architecture, when they fail at much easier task of handling web page availability with a slightly non-trivial load?

You do understand that this is cmu.edu, and the blog post is probably written by a CS prof who has nothing to do with CMU's basic IT operations.

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You do understand that this is "The SEI: The Leader in Software Engineering and Cybersecurity", and the blog post is written by the SEI tech staff?

If our "Software engineering leaders" cannot handle simple tasks, what does it say about our profession?

Do you really think the engineering leaders are the ones who maintain the web servers?

The point is: "If the leaders cannot lead the people under to do what seems like a trivial thing, then mby they should not be called leaders at all?"

What makes you think the webmasters at a large university are "under" the CS professors? They probably never met each other and work in completely different departments.

> If our "Software engineering leaders" cannot handle simple tasks, what does it say about our profession?

It says that they have more important problems to be working on than managing their university's web-servers, which a CS undergrad could do.

But working on “more important” problems, particularly abstract ones, while the basics fail is precisely the complaint about architects:

They’re so busy with their “more important” issues, that the whole thing fails in practice.

If they truly had organizational wisdom we could utilize, why don’t they deploy it themselves, to keep their website online during small spikes in traffic?

If their work can’t even be applied to their own organization successfully, why should we believe it will be successful elsewhere?

How is that even relevant though? She is commenting on that software should be involved earlier in huge military projects that have previously been dominated by hardware and you are nitpicking that the university web server cannot handle the traffic?

Yes — their engineering development principles can’t be (or haven’t been) used to successfully design and deploy a well understood technology like a website that can handle small spikes in traffic; why should we believe they have useful advice for more difficult projects?

“Physician, heal thyself.”

> Yes — their engineering development principles can’t be (or haven’t been) used to successfully design and deploy a well understood technology like a website that can handle small spikes in traffic; why should we believe they have useful advice for more difficult projects?

This is such a weak argument. Where did you hear that their principles were not being applied in real life? Why do you automatically assume the university's website is built on their principles? This entire discussion is trivial.

What it says about the managers and architects if they cannot lead the CS devs to do what they were supposed to do ?

I find it hilarious.

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