Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

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That incident list is damning. Is senior leadership asleep at the wheel, or how can this many incidents possibly happen every 30 days for months on end? If leadership really cared, they'd make sure post-mortems and other best practices are in place to reduce the frequency.

Unfortunately, the executive disconnect isn't new. It's actually uncommon that they care about the reality for end users and customers (which is antithical to my entire ethos, hence why I get paid the medium bucks). Why bother waking up and going to work everyday unless you are contributing in some way to sustaining a better future for everyone? It's actually great for marketing and it's already going to be a tough 100+ years from today for our children, even with our collective care.

P.s. People can be so selfish, it kind of breaks my brain but not really. Have you seen the CO2 emissions visualization from NASA this week? It was a wakeup call for me.

'Tremendous' NASA Video Shows CO2 Spewing from US into Earth's Atmosphere https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-video-carbon-dioxide-co2-emiss...

It's concerning.. and caught no traction.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41064029

here’s a fun connection: https://x.com/anshelsag/status/1814426186933776846

“ For those who don't remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet. The man who was McAfee's CTO at that time is now the CEO of Crowdstrike. The McAfee incident cost the company so much they ended up selling to Intel.”

so yeah, “leadership” (and that’s a loose term) doesn’t seem supremely concerned about much more than earnings

Not to worry, McAfee CTO was not actually in charge of technology

https://archive.is/20240724213623/https://www.barrons.com/ar...

The fish rots from the head.

Also what the fuck is a sales-facing CTO??

I'm suspicious of CrowdStrike now. If we rip the cover off would we find that it's little more than a reskin of McAfee?

McAfee the company or the person? Because John McAfee was pretty out there...

https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-tweet-said-his-s...

McAfee antivirus the product

The Internet is able to transmit odors of rotting flesh????

Recently ordered an HP laptop for some light work (not my startup), and when placing the order said don't include McAfee, that "I don't trust them", all just from some odor!

CloudStrike runs in kernel mode? No wonder there are problems; kernel mode sounds like more of a threat than a protection.

Sooooo, for my Web server(s), McAfee and CloudStrike are issues I get to ignore. Problems avoided and time, money, energy saved!! Simple.

Sometimes it’s good to take a little break after working for a company that ended up not representing your values.

I’m on #2 now and it’s been great. It’s like a breakup. “What was I thinking?”

Of course if it is representing your values and your values are purely mercenary, it’s really not going to change anything.

> a sales-facing CTO

Is that what happens when a company has so many Sales Engineers that they become a parallel department from regular Engineering?

the Sales Engineers are actually engineers. I'm assuming this is more Account Executives and marketing

I assume T stands for [Sales and Marketing]Technology. Which makes perfect sense because these are their core departments that the whole company is dependant on.

The product itself is a secondary cost-center, probably less important than even accounting.

> Also what the fuck is a sales-facing CTO??

Perhaps of a symptom of the "Everyone is in sales" brain damage so pervasive in companies now.

I have noticed this too at my company, do we have any web articles or other references to this being a growing trend?

Have seen region-specific Field CTO roles partner with GTM teams to co-sell with customers. Product and role domain expertise without the organizational technology responsibility.

lol what? a region-specific field CTO is a long way of saying "VP"

Senior VP! Microsoft prints them like money.

McAfee incident 2010 https://www.zdnet.com/article/defective-mcafee-update-causes...

Now that's interesting. I wonder why neither here nor there anybody mentions GK's name. Fear of litigation?

IMO somebody who managed to collapse the most important infrastructure on earth twice in as many decades - not a small feat, I have to admit - should be known by name to the general public, lest he'll get another chance at it.

I haven't seen any important infrastructure on earth collapse, neither in 2010, neither in 2024.

Tell that to the people whose surgeries were cancelled because of computer issues.

That was still not on of the most important piece of infrastructure on earth.

And outages were not as global as news outlets made it look to be. Crowdstrike may have been ubiquitous in some countries, but almost absent in others. And still, crowdstrike or windows windows aren't global pieces of infrastructure.

I admit that was a bit of hyperbole. My point stands regardless.

Tech needs something like the FTC that can ban someone from working in that area after multiple demonstrations of glaring incompetence. Or evil misdirection of competence.

But... But the market forces will take care of that! Right ? Right ?

> Is senior leadership asleep at the wheel, or how can this many incidents possibly happen every 30 days for months on end?

Presumably it doesn't matter that much and isn't worth spending money/manpower on?

If the usefulness/quality of their software has no influence on their potential customers decision making process. why bother?

It would make much more sense to allocate any excess resources to the departments that do actually matter like sales and marketing.

> Presumably it doesn't matter that much and isn't worth spending money/manpower on?

Well, if they think any of the $20B of shareholder value lost recently has to do with the quality issues... Then perhaps they should reconsider. (keep in mind marketcap also represents their ability to raise capital in the future with more/less dillution)

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