geekbird

Yeah, I've seen stuff carved into tiny, fragile microservices when the number of nodes was under ten. Stupid, IMO, and it took a stable service and made it a flaky mess. It was done because of dogmatic "It must be in containers in the cloud with microservices, because that is The Way(TM)". Literally there was an initiative to move everything possible to the cloud in containers with lots of microservices because one of the place's gurus got that religion. It increased complexity, decreased reliability and cost a lot of money for not much benefit.

Until you have well over 20 systems doing one thing/application, trying to treat bespoke services like cattle instead of pets is silly. It will also drive your ops people to drink, especially if it's done by "DevOps" that never get paged, and refer to your group in meetings with other companies as "just ops". (Yes, I'm still salty about it.)

Often I think it's "resume driven development", especially if the people pushing for it want to abandon all your existing tools and languages for whatever is "hot" currently.

Actually, a lot of the people new to DevOps who come from the Dev side don't know the Linux internals. All they know is TF/CF, k8s, Docker and either AWS or GCP. If you asked them to set up a raid array they'd look at you like you just grew a second head. If you asked them how to tell what modules the kernel was running, they wouldn't be able to find out without a lot of googling.

The fact that DevOps does encompass a lot of fundamental Linux system knowledge is glossed over by a lot of people. Then again, some of them don't know any other way to package and deploy software except in containers.

Here's the thing that irks me about things like "standing up k8s in a couple hours": It's something that only gets done a few times for an entire project - once or twice in dev and test, then again in prod. Not even a few times a year - a few times per project/code stack.

The actual work will be "tweak this to have six side cars instead of five", or "set it to spin up a few more nodes", or maybe even "upgrade k8s from version X to version Y without downtime, test your solution on dev first". There has to be some way to test that.

Instead they give you "Bring up a vpc, resources with terraform or cloud formation, spin up k8s, program a webapp that tells me my IP in a container, set up a build system to package it, configure Route 53, then make it all run." - all in three hours.

I don't write scripts or even yaml from scratch that fast. I don't know anyone who does. Most people copy/paste old projects or stuff off of StackOverflow and then mangle it to try to do these silly things.

Even if you swallow the argument that a fetus is a "person", you still have to temper the rights of the fetus who is a parasite on the mother, who is a living, breathing person with rights of her own, including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

If a dead person can't be forced to give up organs without prior consent, a living woman should not be forced to provide life support (at a risk to her own life by the way) for a fetus. Just like I can't be forced to donate a kidney to another person, a woman should not be forced to donate blood, bone and full life support to a fetus.

IOTW, it's literally a matter of competing rights to life. Carrying a pregnancy to term is a mortal risk. Certain pregnancies will kill the mother if not ended, and the fetus will never be viable. Other times the fetus is already dead, but since the law doesn't actually consider the fetus a person, it can't be removed due to abortion bans, and the woman is forced to carry a dead parasite and risk fatal sepsis.

All of this should be left to the woman, her doctor, her circumstances and her conscience, not a bunch of old men in legislatures and courts.

If you need a demigod and a book of fiction to tell you not to lie, cheat and kill then you aren't a very good person underneath.

Morality and ethics are not the exclusive purview of Christianity, or even religion in general. Atheists and agnostics don't need a bible to tell right from wrong.

In fact, religion is often used as an excuse to subjugate others, which is what they're doing by overturning RvW. They are subjugating women of breeding age as baby factories and unpaid child minders whose life course is decided on whether a man ejaculates in her and fertilizes an egg or not (whether she wanted him to or not.) If she catches, her life is no longer hers. It now belongs to the state as a incubation vessel for a potential citizen, and her wishes are now unimportant.

What is allowing the mother to die because abortion is against the law but "post birth" abortion? Or do you think that the lives of women already born should take a back seat to the potential life of a fetus?

Seriously. I accidentally ate 1/4 of a 100mg THC chocolate bar, but it was not the right hybrid to keep me asleep, so I was in and out for hours. 25 mg is more than twice my preferred THC dose.

This. I know a lot of people who need to just ... stop. They always have to be busy, doing something "productive" or "beneficial". They don't take time to just be, to stop and smell the roses.

My problem with sleeping was trying to turn off my geek brain long enough to get to sleep and stay 5that way. Weed helps with that.

When I was in college I tried weed. It was not a recreation for me, it just put me to sleep, a couple hits and I was out on the couch. So I never got into it.

Fast forward a few decades. I now have chronic insomnia due to things like on-call and anxiety. My brain will not shut down enough for sleep. I had tried Ambien, melatonin, blah, blah. Nothing really worked. I went to a party, they had green brownies. I was on the verge of a migraine, so I had a couple. Out on the couch in half an hour. I woke up without the migraine.

So now I use THC/CBD to deal with migraines and insomnia. I can get a good night's sleep if I take a nice, measured dose gummy just before bed. I wake up slightly before my alarm, alert and refreshed. This is a big change from before. If I feel a migraine coming on I put stuff on hold, take a big dose of CBD and some THC and sleep it off. I wake up without the post-migraine stupids that Imitrex causes.

Used responsibly, in moderation, it can have a life-changing benefit - just like other drugs. If it's abused... well, alcohol abuse will kill you too.

This. Premature and excessive fragmenting into unmaintainable and operationally microse5rvices is the bane of my existence. It's often done by zealots, who see microservice architecture as a matter of religious faith, not operability convenience.

Sure, some monoliths are harder to debug if there are multiple distinct packages that need to operate together if they are all in the same container. But fragmenting a simple set of services into a dozen microservices each in their own disconnected container is excessive too. If any of those fragments depend too closely on other fragments to operate (like, say, a timer service and a session renewal service that depends on the timer) it will easily fall over and be nearly impossible to tell why.

If you are going to shard up your application into microservices, be sure to split out your functions conservatively, so that like goes with like. It's easier to split stuff out more later than to try to split every little jot and tittle into its own dinky container. That way you don't end up with little containers of nothing wasting processor and I/O just for the sake of dogma.

This. Develop the logic and flow for all of the thing, make it big, code it simple and even redundant, but really basic and simple. That's your "proof of concept". Pass two is finding and factoring out all of the redundant stuff into functions and libraries, grouping like with like. It's like in relational database design - first you grab all the fields needed, then group them and normalize them.

What's worse is that they want full-on programming, leetcode, algorithm mashing for jobs that end up being nothing more than slinging yaml or json and maybe tweaking a Jenkins job.

That's the reality of DevOps - it's not primarily development, it's applying frameworks to infrastructure and deployment tasks. Get a senior sysadmin in operations and pay for a few courses in what you need from them.

Seriously.

I applied for one position who asked what I wanted, then told me that the top of their range was $5K less than my minimum, was I still interested? LOL, no. My minimum is my minimum now, no dropping it for a hard luck story or company in a cheaper area. Been there, done that, burned that t-shirt.

This also includes being very, very, very upfront on whether your "remote" is: a) real, honest 100% remote, b) 100% remote unless you are within X miles of the office, in which case it's hybrid, c) hybrid that your management thinks is "remote", d) "remote until..." which means you will be called back into the office at the C-suite's whim, or e) on-site unless you are sick or have to meet a repair person at home.

Seriously. I've been doing Linux Systems work for over 20 years. I've written code at one level or another on over 15 languages (scripting, macro and compiled) plus various forms of markdown. 90% of it I learned on the job, even on the fly. I regularly go in to a place ostensibly for one thing, and end up their SME on something else.

Do I remember all the details of every language and stack that I've touched? Hell no! But there are only so many ways to do a for loop or if-then set up. There are only a few flavors of regex out there. Anything more I just look it up. Part of being a senior is knowing what to look up.

What makes me a senior is my ability to learn on the fly, then become an SME, on whatever obscure stack you have. I will never know all of it coming in - there's just too much stuff out there. But there's very little that is so bad that I can't work with it in a few weeks.

But I've been rejected from jobs as "not technical enough" because I didn't have recent, full time, on the tip of my brain, coding to the algorithm and obscure function level in their preferred language "X". It just meant I hadn't coded in "X" in the last month. They though the fact that I didn't do obscure fanciness without looking things up meant I didn't know anything. I wanted to scream and say "No, damnit, I just haven't coded in that for two years, I don't have an eidetic memory."

This is part of why I hate whiteboards and take home crap. I do poorly at them, then get lowballed by smug jerks who think that defines what I know and have done.

I've found some companies are so process bound that they'll go the full set of interview, test, coding rounds even for a personal referral.

I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.

IMO, most engineers massively under-estimate the time it takes to do "simple" tasks if you don't already have the infrastructure/environment set up for it.

I had one take-home "4 hour" assignment that required me to install two different, poorly documented, third party packages on my computer before I could even begin to write the code. The Java-loaded piece of junk that I needed didn't work with my existing setup, and I wasn't going to rebuild my entire system just for some arbitrary assignment. It might have been "4 hours" if I already had an environment with all the extra cruft that they used, but if I had to fart with VMs or rebuild my machine? No, just no.

It's reasonable to expect someone have various languages on their personal boxen, and maybe git, but not repositories, specialized third party tools, etc. I don't run Puppet at home, for example.

LOL! I have worked for a large, well funded, private non-profit university with many millions in its endowment funds. They are probably one of the biggest cheapskates I've even worked for when it comes to IT spend. If it doesn't bring in grant money or student money, it is not supported. They'll spend millions on research computing, but balk at buying anything but the cheapest "ergonomic" chairs for the open plan offices that they cram IT staff into. (Professors and academic staff get offices, IT staff don't even get cubes.)

They might pay for uncensored video hosting and exposure an "edu only" site, but they wouldn't want the expense of hosting their own. The value add would be a content nexus for academic and "open university" lectures that could possibly be monetized by a per view/per topic fee from the users.

It might be a nice business for someone to put together "eduTube" - a video platform for educational institutions. It would have a annual fee per organization based on size.

It would: * allow archiving, or display with sunset on certain lectures * be available to university libraries, lecturers and student projects. * have less stringent content rules because educational * allow each institution could dictate what their rules were * allow institutions to determine who got what type of access

I would do it, but I am kinda soft on the video transcoding skills. Maybe UNL could work on expanding the service, with a fee, to other universities.

Seriously. I'm not an actual software developer, I do systems admin and DevOps config whacking. If I have to bring up an IDE to write something I'm waaaaay out of my wheelhouse. I don't touch JS, React, Java or any of that stuff. So this "technical" interview would tell people absolutely nothing about the skills needed fort my job.

This is a software engineering test only, and very specific stacks at that. It would be a waste of a person's time unless that was the exact stack they used in the past, or was demanded by the job.

That's the problem. Assets can't commit a crime. They aren't people, or even corporations. Yes, maybe a court will determine after conviction that $XX is ill-gotten gains and require the convicted defendant to turn over that money. But stealing before a conviction just on a whim? This has got to stop.

WTF?

Suuure, "up to" one million, but over what time period? Technically $100k/year for 10 years is one million.

That's why I told my manager at an Amazon subsidiary that performance reviews were a farce. Because they were. I was burned out, and seeing all too clearly what a shit show it was. I got a layoff in April.

Yep. This creates a lateral sabotage, work stealing and kiss up culture.

You would have been PIPed and sacked in April.

I have worked at a subsidiary, and other companies worse than Amazon. Imagine if, instead of annual reviews are required to put 5% at the bottom of a stack rank and then "manage them out", you have quarterly stack ranks, where everyone knows who is in the ranking pool, and with two bad quarters you are out, even if it was just the luck of the draw, because management had to dump on someone.

Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)

The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.

So, my roomie is an ex barista. She only does pour over coffee with a Melitta cone and filter. (My wife like K-cups, but they need filtering to get the grounds out.) We have an electric kettle, which we just had to replace because the 15 year old one stopped heating completely.

We also just bought a couple of hot water bottles...

When I write process/operating docs, I write it for the person who is on call, at 02:00 Sunday morning, after overindulging in alcohol Friday night. I don't assume stupid, just not firing on all cylinders due to being half awake and distracted.

Seriously. I hate "video tutorials" on how to do technical stuff. I read faster than videos can explain stuff, and with text I can go back and forth to the stuff I need without trying to forward and reverse a video to a certain time.