rachelbythebay

Feedback: having done your first one, I find myself wondering how the thing got into that state in the first place, and what can be done about it. That is, [Jub be jung fperjrq hc gur crezvffvbaf/bjarefuvcf ba gur erqvf cngu] (spoilers).

Basically, this is the lowest level of "if this then that" fixing, and people need to be able to do that, but they also need to then go "we can't keep operating in this mode".

I mean, yeah, here, it's artificial for the purposes of the exercise. But, if you were to see this in real life, there would be a bunch more questions to ask and things to dig into to keep it from happening again. Randos with root? Bad script somewhere? Terrible system management stuff? RPM getting a little too frisky with how it manages certain directories?

I'm not sure how you get that part into a thing like this, though.

Example audio: https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351

This is close enough to the Seattle feed that you can do a compare & contrast.

Heard: "clear my first call ocean nora 470" On the site: "charlie my first call"

So, yeah, this still has a long long way to go. I considered and discarded this in 2011 because it was pure insanity, and as another comment suggests, it's highly context-sensitive.

"ECR" is El Camino Real. "Vets" is Veterans Blvd.

But...

"Code 99" is the emergency button... for one department... and it means something else entirely for another, just 20 miles apart.

I'd love to have it, but it still seems out of reach.

If you have to ask this about a company, you probably shouldn't. I say this as someone who asked that (not about FB, but about somewhere else), then worked there anyway, and it turned out to be just as bad as my gut was telling me.

There are plenty of gigs where you won't have to ask this.

Note: this response is entirely about your own gut feelings and positions on things, and nobody else's. Not mine, not anyone else who comments here. YOU are who matters.

But they have stickers! Who needs good sync when you have stickers! Oh, and arbitrary emoji reactions!

Seriously... I do not understand how they keep investing in this gold-plating when the plumbing keeps getting clogged up.

Submit better things. Look at the guidelines.

And terrible waste and graft. Can't forget that.

Uh... what?

Oh, you might be surprised how many people are not working on anything of consequence. Some of these companies don't even do much in the way of building stuff outside of the product teams, and even then, they frequently fizzle after some point.

You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.

R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.

Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).

If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).

This is brilliant. It's shocking how well this works.

It's been my experience that people usually build systems that expect a certain timeout for a certain service or perhaps service+method.

That said, not all clients are created equal. The ads folks who used to hit my system way back when had far tighter deadline requirements than the calendar or spreadsheet people, for instance.

What does the business need?

What can the service deliver?

If you need it faster than it can deliver... then setting your timeouts/paging/whatever to that point will just bring you pain and suffering.

I think you'll find a lot of people just say "what's p99 right now", add a little to it so "it won't page me", and leave it there.

Actually driving down p99... is not nearly common enough.

Yeah, I know, I'm terrible. I don't know jack about this stuff. I should just stop now while I'm behind. Clearly.

If you get stuck in read(), you can't do neat things like waking up when it's time to kick a client for being idle, doing other housekeeping, or cleanly shutting down the whole thing in a timely fashion. When I ^C the server, it sends the same wake condvar-poke but it twiddles the flags so the worker shuts down instead.

I do? Holy crap when do I start getting those checks?

Nine Inch Nails "Every Day is Exactly the Same" (2005)

Is it really buy? Or is it "rent"?

I'm guessing for most people, it's actually "rent".

FYI: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C64C.jpg

Lots and lots of revs, apparently.

Show them this thread so they know to find another job, because you're obviously not going to treat this person well as a direct report.

You're here saying they're being negative, but you're not saying whether they're right or not, and if it's appropriate. They're going to have a bad time on your team unless you change your ways.

Ah, my old nemesis, the shifted space. Haven't been bitten by one of those in a while. Thanks for digging that up!

Hi?

I wonder: what is the bad character? It's apparently not 0x20, but what is it? How did it get there? What keeps this from happening again to someone else?

Very nice. Thank you.

It’s a warning. If they call it that, be wary of signing on.

Unless, you know, you like doing ops work all day every day.

This is going to sound cliched, but I'm doing this in part for the people who can't do this. I have the flexibility to do this, and I kind of figure "from me, according to my ability". If it improves the situation, then I've succeeded to some small extent.

Everyone else: if you can't stick your neck out, DON'T.

(Also, some people want to hire you because you're a straight shooter and you don't stand for bullshit. It's not burning bridges, it's finding the ones that weren't worth a damn in the first place. The good ones will still be there, and will be even stronger for it.)

Let's not forget the stuff that'll break December 31, 2020... because it'll be day 366 (or 365, if 0-indexed).

Anyone still using a Zune out there?

I know people who have raised multiple kids beyond the point of them graduating from college and themselves starting their own families who are still in this industry (by choice), and are still sharp as ever.

I've also worked with people who are 25 years old and who have clearly given up on life or anything more than turning the crank and getting their biweekly ration of pellets. They live in fear of being discovered or "found out" and turned out on the street to sell the Mercury News on the onramp to 101.

Age, experience, rigor, knowledge, energy level, mindset. Don't confuse one for any of the others. It's a multi-dimensional problem. Also, it isn't static.

I can probably give you an example of a coworker at any position in that n-way space just from my own experiences, and that's only with a 25 year career. I can only imagine what else I'll encounter next.

Okay now I have to go check. Thanks for the tip!

ODBC was not used anywhere prior to this point. The company had its own hardened transports.

The frontend systems, taken as a whole, amounted to a bitchin’ botnet. They’d destroy ordinary services without even working up a sweat.

Using the right mechanisms for comms between them was in everyone’s best interest.

Pretty sure it’s the domain name.

Also the time of day/day of week.

But mostly the domain name.

Counterpoint: Rackspace. The line internally was "service, not servers". They developed CORE which was their customer tracking and computer provisioning system. When RightNowWeb stopped working for them, they built the CATS ticketing system on top of that.

Those were nice tools which worked quite well most of the time. They worked in any browser on any OS, unlike some of the ActiveX-only stuff they tried to replace it with.

This is not the Rackspace you probably know. This is the teeny little one that nobody had heard of outside of a few advertisements in Linux Journal (and the occasional rant about spammers and malware hosting). This is them back before the whole cloud thing - over fifteen years ago.