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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

These managed development environments are wonderful: consistent experience, secure, compliant, scalable, etc. That is, right up until it goes down. Then the productivity of your entire development team (and thus the output of the six figure salaries they are paid) drops to exactly zero while you bring up the managed development environment again.

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Seems like it would also not be so wonderful if your remote employees are in rural areas (like the Joshua Tree area I reside in); I don't think I could handle the latency between keystrokes.

Surely you have options though? In Rural NZ we have a choice between 4g which runs at about 50mbps and latency of about 15ms and starlink which runs at around 100mbps and has a latency of about 25ms.

Both should be good enough for remote work.

I like how you're implying I haven't worked here for years and don't know the options. I have the best possible option and that system can be flaky for hours on end depending on a lot of factors.

I wasn't implying that at all, more I was shocked at how a country like America doesn't have high speed broadband ubiquitously available. So it was more rhetorical than anything.

Fair enough. You have my apologies

California by itself is bigger (by population and surface area) than all of NZ, to say nothing of the rest of the US. I'm not saying that the US has done a great job with internet access, just that it's not exactly a fair comparison.

Having more people in a bigger area increases the aggregate expense, but also provides more people to spread it around (and the US also has a higher per capita GDP.)

There may be legitimate differences that make this harder for the US that aren’t simple failures, but you haven’t identified one.

I just set up IntelliJ to use my remote workstation for LSP and Build and Test, but all of the text editing happens locally.

Specifically the files are also hosted remotely but the local text buffers are synced in the background not every keystroke.

How did you manage this? Every time I tried it, Idea insistent on managing the lsp server itself and locally.

But the frontend runs locally via JavaScript, so while latency is real, there shouldn't be more between keystrokes than, say, VScode. (Because otherwise that would be intolerable.)

That's pretty much everything these days. But it isn't a big deal because most companies are not efficient enough to have downtime-from-dev-environment be a significant negative factor for any performance metric.

It is a big deal, because ad-hoc development environments don’t break simultaneously. They can also be fixed by the developer using them. Even if, say, GitHub goes down, I can still email / DM a git am patch to a colleague for a code review (and they can send me a patch with comments).

Choosing a shared environment is basically choosing to randomly give your development team a snow day. Maybe you’re okay with that tradeoff, but when it rains it pours… prod likely will go down when you can’t use the cloud dev machines.

True. But I found stacks that are simple (and micro service) enough to run on my laptop to be much faster to develop on.

How often do you think the entire global infrastructure or even a multi region service goes down?

Using AWS as an example (because that’s what I know), if Cloud 9 in us-east goes down and it’s not the entire service, I just launch from another region, do a git clone and keep moving.

It takes less than 2 minutes to bring up an environment if GCP’s offering is similar to AWS’s. I am assuming it will be.

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