Not everyone finds BigCorp problems to be the interesting problems. Not everyone wants to live in the Bay Area. There's a lot of jobs in the world that aren't at FAANG, and it's okay if the right job for someone is at a place whose entire dev shop is smaller than the team at Google that maintains Blaze. If you find yourself in a job like that, it is absolutely the right call to invest in the best commodity tools you can (where best is a local, not a global, maxima) and focus on the things you can do that add value to your org.
Tools you’d miss if you left a company
51–60 of 112 posts
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#52I’ve been at places where they should of bought vs build, because they don’t put enough staff on it
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#53Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period?
Different companies have different problems. Big companies need big expensive tools to help with their problems. Little companies usually get by with smaller more portable tools. Let's not use this to demean people at small companies with some false sense of superiority please...
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if it's a tool which halves your operating costs and eliminates a new technology stack you'd need to teach your whole dev team? What if the only tech that solves the problem is Oracle, and your business model can't cope with the costs that would incur? (I have a specific example in mind but it's private. Poor evidence for an argument; but I'll stand by the fact that some business problems require too much glue w…
Do the math - maybe it works in your case. I'd say a key question to ask is "Do I have a technical problem that's legitimately unusual and faced by very few other businesses?" If the answer is "no", then you should identify how other businesses are solving the problem and come up with really convincing reasons why you could do it cheaper. When doing the math: A common mistake is to calculate the cost of "build" as SU…
What if the product doesn't work without the tech, because it's several orders of magnitude too slow with commodity public tech?
(I'd end up writing an essay if I was to fill this out to full detail.)
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#55Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…
Given the background of the blog's author, I wouldn't hold my breath
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#56If you can't come up with anything, it's possible you're just beyond repair and too snarky to think reasonably Or perhaps that we've mostly worked in crap dev jobs/companies? There are easily enough of them around to encompass a career.
She explains that in the second half of the paragraph you quoted.
You're right. The internet has done nothing for my reading comprehension.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#57If the tool is valuable to you, make sure you know exactly how it works. Then you can recreate it, for yourself at least, whenever you go.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#58This whole premise falls completely flat if you've only ever worked at small and/or young companies: > but which didn't exist on the outside world. > You're not allowed to include things you or your friends built If you work for a service provider, you probably have zero to not much internal tooling, because you're usually solving the customer's problems, not your company's. When I did, we open sourced everything coo…
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.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#59I just joined apple and I miss all the Linux tools
Yeah but you have Radar. Didn't realize how much I liked it until after I left
TIL antbear is another name for an aardvark
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#60Couldn’t it be argued that all software is built with more “glue” than non-glue? That’s just the nature of the beast. If a user wants to, say, view a record from a remote database in her web browser, how many separate layers of code does that involve? (Several.) How many of them aren’t “glue”? (I dunno, like two?)
Perhaps it’s true that most glue is poorly written, but doesn’t that imply that writing good glue is, in fact, difficult, and therefore it’s as hard — or maybe harder - than building “real” things?