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Comment by adornKey | Hacker News Reader

We had a young guy writing good software for us while he still was going to school. We still use it to get things done in production. Then he went to university. He came back for a summer job. He had the sudden urge to ditch everything he used to do and to use the newest unproven technology. Also he had a serious urge to install everything from Microsoft.

Then he created a piece of slow software full of flaws and performance problems - with a lot of unnecessary fluff in the UI. (At some time he mentioned that he was going to use multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI).

Then he joined Mercedes-Benz... And makes a lot of money there. And I'm really happy that I don't have to worry about him anymore. I read some job descriptions for Mercedes-Benz and I think he most likely totally fits in there.

What they do to young people in Universities today must be really terrible...

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MB is also famous for running Kubernetes. At a 1000 individual setups (all automated of course!). I had the pleasure of flamewaring someone who was very proud of this and couldn't really explain to me, why they would not just get two big physical machines with Corosync for like 70% of those (internal) applications. Doesn't seem much worse than a 3-node Kubernetes cluster (which is going to experience serious disruption too if anything goes down if it is running at full load......) and I doubt that scaling is an important concern with this setup.

At my last company we used k8s not primarily because of the scaling capabilities, but as a way to safely deploy applications.

I've seen it used this way too.

But that's like buying the mcdonalds supersize family meal because you want the fries. There's better ways to go about it.

At my previous job we used docker swarm for a cluster of a dozen machines. Does not have all the fancy features of k8s but gets the job done to automate deployments

It might not be ideal but getting all of that admin and upgrade tooling for free is often worth it

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing.

Not trying to blame anyone here. Did no one guide him? Just by virtue of him being a young student, surely his unproductive proclivities were easily correctable? Was he averse to mentoring?

He already did great things in the past. I liked him a lot before university.

There is too much self-esteem in those young guys. And they blindly trust every new framework that shows up on the market. Also they have excellent grades in university and get offered a lot of money. Somehow guys from management and HR like them. For me there was not much chance to mentor anything.

I could talk more about young guys being problematic... but to me this was extraordinary and somehow related to the things people complain about Mercedes software.

For me two things seem to be dysfunctional: 1) University today and in this case the University closest to Mercedes headquarter 2) HR (as usual...). Things like "practical experience with multi-threaded UI performance improvements" in a CV somehow clicks with HR. At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table. I bet Mercedes HR will love this when he writes a nice line about that in his CV...

> At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table.

micro-column-service oriented schema. He'll go far /g

> I could talk more about young guys being problematic

It's the false sense of 'knowledge' afforded by trivial access to technical content without the benefit of practical experience. It's the internet, not the young men. LLMs are going to max this to an unpleasant extreme.

> multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI

Maybe it wasn't needed for those internal apps, but for consumer electronics I wish everyone reduced input feedback lag.

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