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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

There is a large gradient between 'fucking around in production' and crippling big corporate process. Maybe the big tech companies all have the perfect amount of process, but much of the process and ceremony at other big companies I've seen is simply in place to keep the lowest common developer employed. Heck, people complain about excessive process on this very site all the time.

On other nitpick is that startups live and die with automation by their lean nature. They have fewer resources and must automate everything they can. It's built into startups mindset.

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> On other nitpick is that startups live and die with automation by their lean nature. They have fewer resources and must automate everything they can. It's built into startups mindset.

I am at a medium sized company. We acquired a startup. They did not "live and die with automation", instead they contracted out the production operations. A dozen customers, all on snowflake systems which were constantly tweaked directly in prod with no documentation or audit process.

My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it. Design? Testing? Documentation? Automation? None of that existed in this company in any fashion. And they are themselves grating against a modicum of process. Please explain what you want to do, why, and provide a high level design. You are going to replace the whole auth system, it's not something you just "figure out" as you go along... Sigh.

> My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it

This has been my experience exactly. Automation has a high upfront cost where that payoff is in the long term. As a startup the priority is on income now. Not cost saving that pays off over the next year.

Yes, but I'll be the first to admit it's a lot of fun to be able to work like that... from time to time.

Context is important also, a lot of young companies are still trying to figure out their optimal business model, so agility really is more important; adapt or die (kind of).

Lastly, you have to consider why anyone would ever work for a startup; they often pay less, more stress, less security, unpredictable environment, etc... but you get to do ridiculous experiments in production and try to build something cool. It's part of the incentive structure.

> A dozen customers, all on snowflake systems which were constantly tweaked directly in prod with no documentation or audit process.

I've directly seen this at all sizes of companies. I worked at a billion+ revenue company and watched my boss edit stored procedures directly on production (for way more than a dozen customers). I ended up encrypting them in prod to force him through the build process I made.

The point is that there is wild west going on everywhere, and the size of the company is only one factor. There are startups with great engineering and big companies with terrible engineering. It's just the state of software right now.

Try to think about the other side of this. Do you want to be standing in line at the grocery store and have your debit card just not work at all because Visa aquired this dudes startup and he didn't understand that feature X wasn't implemented because it would swamp the 10 megabit VPN link between Visa and your credit union?

It isn't about keeping the lowest common developer employed, it is about keeping the lowest common developer from bricking the entire system. Unless of course you can tell me where to find enough developers of your skill level to write all the code required to run a modern society.

consider $bigco making $10B year

that's $20K/minute

chances are, $shiny_acquisition isn't making $20K/minute, and woe is the helpful IT responder who kills the golden goose. it'd be crazy if anyone can do that, so many layers of bureaucracy & compliance have evolved to prevent that.

The solution is generally (a) do work not involving production (b) work where production isn't like that, which is generally smaller companies or a surprisingly small number of ~tech companies. Digital Transformation (cloud, PaaS, ...) often involves trying to enable self-serve at enterprise-scale, but I generally still see roadblocks when GPUs, TLS, DNS, SaaS, etc, get involved.

Instead of sending the credit card ID number across the phone line, we will take a picture of the credit card for extra security, and send a full RAW PNG each time.

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