aluminussoma

In the several examples of separate SRE orgs that I've seen, SRE builds their own little empires with no alignment to the product. A cynic would guess that the goal of SRE management is to hire enough SREs so there can be senior managers and directors and eventually a VP with pay packages to boot.

They come to Product from the mountain-top with their holy scriptures (the Google SRE book), prescribing surface solutions to problems with deep roots (pray it away with SLOs).

SRE 2.0 needs to make the embedded model work.

In my division, there is an infrastructure team and product teams. Those platform type projects are handled by the infrastructure team. In a product only team, it will always be difficult to work on such projects.

Ultimately, the answer ties back into the identity question: what is SRE?

SRE has an identity crisis. It means too many things to too many people. In some companies, it is an operational help desk. In a few companies, SRE is rumored to be a different aspect of software engineering.

Pay is a rough signal on what a company expects from SRE. If SREs get paid as much or more than Software Engineers, it is a good sign. Yet even that signal is not accurate. I know highly paid SREs stuck in Ops Hell. You could not pay me enough money to do a job like that. It is also not sustainable because eventually the company will fire you and replace you with a lower paid employee who can do that job just as well.

I strongly oppose organizations that have SRE separate from Software Engineers. I strongly believe that SREs must be fully integrated into Software Engineering teams (aka the embedded model), with the same reporting lines as their product colleagues.

Keeping SRE organizationally separate has done a great disservice to SRE. SRE 2.0 needs to tear down the mini empires that SRE 1.0 built and get back to software engineering.

The link for "The UNIX time-sharing system" only provides a 1-page PDF of the abstract. I believe the correct PDF is located at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361011.361061

It wasn't clear to me by looking at the pages themselves. I hope usability will not be a huge issue and negate the benefit of this open access!

I am going to post an alternative take to the general sentiment that saw this coming from a mile away. I think it is awesome that an organization as old as TimeWarner was able to launch a bold new product. Yes, it may have failed, but they tried.

Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible, in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.

The news story correlates school attendance with cancer diagnosis. Most schools draw students from specific neighborhoods nearby. Everyone focuses on the school itself. I want to know if the "pollutant" could have come from the neighborhood instead. The article doesn't mention anything about teachers being affected. Teachers are likely to live in different areas than the student.

Exactly. He is not the only person thinking this; he was just the only one who put his thoughts on paper. I remember when American capitalism was about succeeding by making other people successful. This kind of business - succeeding by sucking the blood out of your employees - should never be tolerated.

Since complaining on Hacker News is the only way to effectively reach Google employees, I'll say that as a customer I am confused at the offerings of Google Domains and GCP Cloud Domains (via Cloud DNS). I recently registered a domain via Cloud Domains and it shows up under Google Domains.

Now I use brown paper bags I get at the grocery stole, without any holes. I did not notice any success with mesh. Maybe I will try it again.

No matter how much care I take to store Russet potatoes, or other potatoes, they always grow sprouts after a few days. I store them in a paper bag, in my laundry room where it is cold and dark (and the dryer, which I don't use often, exhausts outside).

Yet when I buy them at the grocery story, I see no sprouts.

Given the time it takes to get from the farm to the grocery store, no doubt these potatoes have been sprouting during their journey. Does the grocery store remove the sprouts before they put them out for sale?

Come on, that is being being pedantic about semantics. They do not need to be all-in with open source to like it/love it/appreciate it.

I was taught that management theory sprung from army management. These were the first organizations that required coordinating very large groups of people - in the life or death situations of war, and in the brutal monotony of peace.

I doubt that there were enough slaveowners or slaves in charge to contribute anything substantial to the management profession. It is an interesting tale in today's sentiment of antiwork.

I don't think the recruiter gets 10% of the salary anymore. I have seen recent recruiter fees for 20% of the first year base salary. People should know that.

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left.

On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).

Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.

Cal Newport and Shane Parrish, in a discussion on the Knowledge Project podcast, talked unfavorably about to-do lists. They favored scheduling time to perform the needed tasks in a daily calendar.

I tried that calendaring system a few times. It did not work for me. To-do lists are easy, comfortable, familiar. They may not work for millionaires. They work for me.

It got a chuckle out of me. I went through the Wikimedia source to track down a bug and I can agree with the sentiment.

I guess most technologies are like that. Once it is written, once the major bugs are caught, few revisit the code anymore.

Some metacommentary: It is quite nice to see, in 2021, someone publishing original thoughts on a blog with their own photos (mostly). I did not see any advertisements. It seems quite old fashioned today.

Looking at the front page, most links are produced as part some commercial effort. I miss the old non-profit part of the internet.

If we look at the wikipedia definition of social media, it states: "Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks"

I personally view the old IRC (Efnet!), BBS, chat rooms, ICQ as the earliest form of social media. And just as addictive - I couldn't wait to get home from school and jump into a chat room. I checked it as often as I did Facebook later on.

Because it's entertaining. I don't feel the toxicity there is harmful to me, personally. I stopped using Facebook because I did feel that the FOMO-feelings I got were harmful to me.

I do a lot of things that are unhealthy, in moderation. Certain TV shows I watch are toxic to some extent, but I still watch them.

I am now off popular social media (Facebook, Instagram). The void is now replaced with other forms of social media (Reddit, Hacker News).

Reddit, arguably, is more toxic than my version of Facebook - but it is strangers being toxic, and zero FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) which is prevalent on Facebook and Instagram.

Here's an older thread on the cable: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7794520

This was pre-2013. So perhaps the proprietary connector was a reaction to the cable?

I suspect they began soldering it because the cable connecting the disk drive had a lot of problems in older MacBooks. Soldering may have been an easy fix for that.

I hate the soldering, too. I'm just offering an explanation that may make some sense given the context.

What happened to cause such a long outage?

Because of greed. For most humans, what you have is never enough.

A few years ago, Netflix had a reputation of paying very well to lower level senior employees (think L5 and L6), but not as competitively for higher level employees (L7+).

Don't quit! I'd rather have good, honest people working at Google, instead of them quitting Google. What would Google be like if no good people worked there?

The highest performing teams I have been a part of did not regularly do estimates for planned work. That may be the best practice for 2021.

If we had to absolutely deliver by a fixed date - a rarity - we broke the task down in parts that could be estimated, identified the dependencies between tasks, and kept management informed if those dates could slip.

This lightweight process worked pretty well if we had to implement it. There was a lot of trust put in the engineers.

In California, most companies that require after hours duties because engineers are on-call, provide a company issued cell phone device because of California Labor Code section 2802: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

The companies that do not do that are exposing themselves to unnecessary legal risk in the future.

This is happening on my team, with a stark difference being that we are all paid dizzying tech salaries. Money only motivates people to an extent.

The hideous workaround is why it is here. Super interesting to see someone else carve an unintuitive path forward against seemingly unmovable obstacles. Very much a hacker mentality.

The closest model I could find to this is a SaaS usage model (think AWS) or an all-you-can-eat subscription model (think Adobe Creative Cloud). I dislike these models myself as a customer. At least in a usage model, you get payment when your software is used.

Thank you for eloquently stating this. I've thought a lot about this as well.