I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#261

Post by closeparen » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

maemilius wrote: post #228

Aeolun wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best architectures, requirements and designs come from a team with a fantastic lead/architect/product manager?

This. 100% this. Any product of real complexity _must_ have a single person or very small group of people overseeing it. This is doubly true if you're product is using micro-services. The product my current employer is working on suffers immensely from a lack of central leadership to the point where each of the pieces of the application have different (and sometimes contradictory!) ideas of what the world looks like.…

Any product of real complexity is too big for any one person to hold in their head with sufficient detail. That's why we have modularity. (Microservices are just one kind of module boundary).

In my experience, central leaders want to impose grand sweeping worldviews that just aren't true when you get into the weeds of particular use cases. The Director gets a pretty architecture diagram but the engineers actually building and maintaining the feature live in a train wreck. And for what? You don't actually need uniformity across unrelated parts of the system. Architecture shouldn't be about a director's view of his kingdom, but about engineers' ability to sustainably deliver business value, which starts with using the right abstractions for the problem at hand.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#262

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

Asooka wrote: post #192

finnthehuman wrote: post #185

I'm a recovering security guy. When I listen to security people rant, I can see their points and it's a bit of fun, I like a good rant. But I get the impression that they're continuously discovering new and exciting ways that individual facets of individual pieces of software (and the processes around them) suck. All without ever accepting that the entirety of the software ecosystem sucks (and that they're rarely mov…

I don't understand what "accept" is meant to mean here. If we accept that everything sucks, the only thing left to do is leave the field, since it will always suck no matter what we do. If we try to make it better, then we're not accepting that it sucks. I think there is a better way to phrase what you mean.

[deleted]

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#263

Post by majormajor » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:30 PM UTC

Asooka wrote: post #192

finnthehuman wrote: post #185

I'm a recovering security guy. When I listen to security people rant, I can see their points and it's a bit of fun, I like a good rant. But I get the impression that they're continuously discovering new and exciting ways that individual facets of individual pieces of software (and the processes around them) suck. All without ever accepting that the entirety of the software ecosystem sucks (and that they're rarely mov…

I don't understand what "accept" is meant to mean here. If we accept that everything sucks, the only thing left to do is leave the field, since it will always suck no matter what we do. If we try to make it better, then we're not accepting that it sucks. I think there is a better way to phrase what you mean.

Leaving the field won't help, the whole damn world sucks.

You have to accept that there's no perfect alternative out there, you won't tomorrow magically find a system with no flaws, and system design is hard because the world is constantly changing and you don't have perfect information. If you just chase "something better" because you can't accept things, you'll continue to be disappointed.

Once you accept it, you can start trying to make your little corner of the world better. Not perfect, but better. It's more satisfying than shouting into the void.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#264

Post by TheFiend7 » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

platz wrote: post #230

finnthehuman wrote: post #185

I'm a recovering security guy. When I listen to security people rant, I can see their points and it's a bit of fun, I like a good rant. But I get the impression that they're continuously discovering new and exciting ways that individual facets of individual pieces of software (and the processes around them) suck. All without ever accepting that the entirety of the software ecosystem sucks (and that they're rarely mov…

Not really security, but regarding software in general, Mud is one of the reasons I gravitated torwards pure FP languages. It doesn't solve everything, but the added guarantees help shift some of the cognitive burden away from having to dig into every method to have to see what's going on, and I can spend that mental budget elsewhere.

Maybe FP forces some degree of added conformity to the code. But I find code maintenance and readability has more to do with the person writing it than the tool they used IMHO.

FYI I am in fact an FP fan, and I use FP principles in a large amount of my code. But I've seen some seriously convoluted and confusing FP code just like I've seen behemoths of objects with twisted internal state manipulation balancing on blind assumptions and false guarantees of order.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#265

Post by frogpelt » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

sowbug wrote: post #247

dehrmann wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get the impression that they're continuously discovering new and exciting ways that individual facets of individual pieces of software (and the processes around them) suck As a software engineer, I think this is my experience at every job I've had around systems in general.

As a person sometimes overly distracted by grammar, I would like to thank you for using the "As a [description of subject], [subject] [rest of sentence]" construction correctly. Getting this wrong, which is called a "dangling modifier" error, is common. Examples from today's front-page HN discussions: As a new (1 year) coder starting out at 39 years old, this sounds very similar to the path I envision for myself. As…

As a fellow Hacker News commenter, thanks for pointing this out.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#266

Post by im_with_stupid » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

raducu wrote: post #198

im_with_stupid wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd get much less reprimand if this information was somehow leaked to someone else who then was stupid enough to do it, although to avoid any legal "abetting" you'd have to have some actual documented cya saying "don't mess with this broken feature".

I don't have any ill feelings against the bank or the management, it's just a stupid setup where the local prophet gets ignored, we are swamped with bugs, new business features, new regulatory features, outdated devops, a lot of teams scrambling to catch the monthly release, understaffed qa, non-functional test environments and so on. I can understand every piece of the long string of factors that lead to this ridicu…

That might be true, but hacking without explicit consent is a good way to get fired with potential jail time.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#267

Post by arminiusreturns » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:38 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #56

scirocco wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard from someone selling security products that some companies prefer to pay ransonware to a hacker, instead of investing in building up their defense and paying for security products

The easiest security investment is to switch your shop from Windows, cutting like 98% of threats out there cold.

So much this. The problem is mostly that this requires executive buy in, and clear explanation of the cost shift associated. Then, even after executive buy in, you have to guard against CISSP "windows on everything" saboteurs who know the C-speak better than you do, not to mention the people who want a vendor product for everything instead of just using industry standard FOSS tooling. To me, there is a lot of market opportunity here, but the MBA side is behind and so the implementation is lagging.

This is why I think one of the key things is in stack standardization (choose best in class foss tools that match requirements, for example, I personally have a gpl or gpl compat requirement), and stack size reduction (which means you don't need every fancy sounding tool that you hear about, make sure the use case is justified first).

People have such a stockholm syndrome relationship with MS (and proprietary sw in general) it's absolutely sickening. For example, I think educational institutions should be teaching and using FOSS first.

Some will whine about no one using linux or not knowing how, and one response I use is "you had to learn how to use windows too, and even it changes things up, just look at 7 to 8/10, so why not learn to use gnu/linux and free yourself from MS?"

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#268

Post by finnthehuman » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #263

Asooka wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what "accept" is meant to mean here. If we accept that everything sucks, the only thing left to do is leave the field, since it will always suck no matter what we do. If we try to make it better, then we're not accepting that it sucks. I think there is a better way to phrase what you mean.

Leaving the field won't help, the whole damn world sucks. You have to accept that there's no perfect alternative out there, you won't tomorrow magically find a system with no flaws, and system design is hard because the world is constantly changing and you don't have perfect information. If you just chase "something better" because you can't accept things, you'll continue to be disappointed. Once you accept it, you c…

Thank you. I think I sounded too pessimistic in the grandparent post but you saw where I was coming from.

There's always more work to do. On almost everything. As a former co-worker liked to say: If it wasn't hard, they wouldn't pay us to do it.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#269

Post by arminiusreturns » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

formercoder wrote: post #77

shifto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as cutting 98% of your workforce as no office employee knows how to work on anything different.

And of your productivity for those tied to excel, word, and powerpoint

Those products in Wine. Google web, office 365, libre/open office, atom/sublime, vim/emacs.

Re: I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

#270

Post by rymohr » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

finnthehuman wrote: post #260

rymohr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate when I see people throwing in the towel like this. As a two developer company with four separate products doing nearly $500k in ARR collectively, Kumu [1] is a living example that it doesn’t have to be this way. We rely heavily on bash, docker and cloudformation. We only use Ubuntu LTS and we lag a release behind so there are plenty of tutorials available when it comes time to upgrade. After experimenting with…

I'm a bad writer. I'm not trying to throw in the towel, say software can't be fun, or that useful products can't be built within the status quo. I can look at the product I develop and rattle off an impressive list of capabilities, talk about how well it is designed, say why it's the best product for the job on the market and talk about successes in the field. But I can also look at it and see a laundry list of desig…

Not a bad writer at all. And I think all the problems you describe do exist. I'm just saying keep your head up and look too the bright side.

Be happy that you have a job that compensates you well, aligns with your values, is flexible to your personal needs, allows you to grow professionally, and enables you to reach for the goals you've set while you're here on earth.

And if that doesn't describe your job, please quit and come work with us or any other company that respects you as a human being first and a sysadmin second. Life's too short to do otherwise.