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Inside the longest Atlassian outage

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Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#321

Post by KronisLV »

ornornor wrote: post #244
mistrial9 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told by a lifetime manager turned successful consultant, that roughly fifty percent of engineering firms govern their engineers basically using fear.

> using fear Could you elaborate? What kind of fear? “You’re fired”? I wonder how effective it actually is because of the current job market and also because I (and others) react very poorly to this kind of tactics: “you want me to fear getting fired? Joke’s on you, please DO fire me, I dare you”

> I wonder how effective it actually is because of the current job market

Counterpoint: software developers aren't necessarily well paid or highly regarded everywhere, since remote working for companies abroad hasn't quite gotten mainstream enough.

So it might just be effective against some people, or in cases where the hiring process itself has become increasingly unreasonable - the job being working on boring CRUD apps but the hiring process being multiple stages of Leetcode and complex interviews.

That's probably not applicable to everyone since plenty of folk can grokk Leetcode and find jobs without too much trouble, but i still recall "The Unseen 99%" article: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

It probably applies to the industries and companies where devs are treated as a cost center and since those companies aren't all out of business, plenty of people must be working in such environments, with sometimes sub-optimal conditions.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#322

Post by Aissen »

tpmx wrote: post #258
Aissen wrote: post #133

The sad truth is that with 99.8% of customers unaffected, it was probably thought to be a minor issue. If those customers didn't have Gergely's ear we probably wouldn't have heard about it.

Is there a source on this number?

From the article:

> Atlassian claims the customers impacted were “only” 0.18% of its customer base at 400 companies.

From https://jira-software.status.atlassian.com/ :

> The team is continuing the restoration process for the ~400 impacted customers.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#323

Post by mh- »

hinkley wrote: post #179
bombcar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most SLAs say "if we miss this, you get time for free" which means that these companies will hopefully get a refund ... for the time they can't use the service. SLAs are mostly aspirational.

Cars warranties are also aspirational/virtue signaling, to a point. If the maintenance costs exceed the margins on the cars you lose money. Do that on too many product lines for too often and you’re looking at bankruptcy. But some makers clearly are more risk averse than others, so a 6 year warranty from maker X does not translate to a 7 year warranty from maker Y.

But Atlassian's (published*) SLA offers a credit of at most 50% of the month.. not really the same as a manufacturer warranty on a car, which the costs of servicing could easily exceed the price paid for the car.

* - their larger customers will have negotiated SLAs.

edit: to be clear, I expect Atlassian will offer concessions beyond their SLA obligations. I'm only responding to the comparison.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#325

Post by mcintyre1994 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #168
profmonocle wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually got an email from our Atlassian contact just the other day encouraging us to switch to their cloud service. Crazy that no one thought to pause those. (I assume it must have been scheduled.)

This article on HN is the only time I've even heard that Atlassian was having a problem. I suspect that 99% of the tech "community" has absolutely no idea this is happening. We use Jira, but it's self-hosted for my team. Maybe other teams that have transitioned to the cloud version are aware that there's a problem, but I haven't heard about it.

It’s only 400 teams affected, but from this article it sounds like they’re all really big ones.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#326

Post by [deleted] »

agalunar wrote: post #309
codycraven wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you've been hurt by the some terrible management practices, I'm truly sorry that some managers think their job is to control their subordinates. However, regarding ticketing systems, in team environments, it is very effective and helpful to have a system that manages the data about the work that has been completed, is being worked, and is planned to be worked on . Part of that system might be defining…

Caveat: this is going to be a meta comment rather than a comment about the topic proper, and so maybe not appropriate for HN, but I think it's worth discussing. > It sounds like you've been hurt by the some terrible management practices, I'm truly sorry that some managers think their job is to control their subordinates. When we assume someone was hurt, and imply they hold an opinion only because they were hurt, we r…

[deleted]

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#327

Post by brazzledazzle »

codycraven wrote: post #185
closeparen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA is a framework for making assembly lines out of knowledge workers. When you're a middle manager at a decent sized company, a major problem you face is that the mass of knowledge workers beneath you are opaque : you have no way of knowing whether they're working or not. Another problem you face is that they're uppity : people who went to college and got used to managing their own time now have all kinds of idiosy…

It sounds like you've been hurt by the some terrible management practices, I'm truly sorry that some managers think their job is to control their subordinates. However, regarding ticketing systems, in team environments, it is very effective and helpful to have a system that manages the data about the work that has been completed, is being worked, and is planned to be worked on . Part of that system might be defining…

Micro managers are everywhere, even in places that may seem culturally incompatible. I’ve yet to work for a business that prioritizes regularly evaluating managers for their management skills. It’s only addressed when shit really hits the fan. Managers are primarily evaluated by their own managers on deliverables. As long as they’re getting results and entire teams aren’t quitting simultaneously there’s no need to question anything. As long as a manager is toxic in ways that don’t break the law or violate major company policies any attempt to address this by a direct report carries the risk of termination or retribution. Does it contradict your company’s cultural values? Rules for thee.

And I wouldn’t assume you’re not one of them. The worst cases I’ve run into aren’t even the psychos that embrace micro management as part of their “management style”. It’s the ones that genuinely believe they aren’t engaging in the behavior. They’re not micro-ing, they’re “helping” their team because they are an awesome manager and their team is almost awesome, they just need to be monitored very carefully and given “suggestions” until they nail it. But they’ll never nail it. Because no one is as smart, experienced or does a task “just so”. They view themselves as a mentor to all. All decisions must be theirs to make. Jira becomes the perfect tool since the team effectively becomes little boxes that accept tickets or stories and return work both performed and delivered as specified.

For any managers reading this that don’t see a problem with this or see some of those behaviors in yourself please understand that you are sacrificing your team’s happiness and motivation at the altar of your own insecurities. No one can grow where they’re not trusted and no one can improve their skills when they’re never given latitude to make meaningful decisions. Your people will make mistakes. They will accomplish things in ways that are different from how you would do them. It might even be objectively worse. That’s ok. That’s how you grow into a strong team with confident members.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#328

Post by robertlagrant »

grog454 wrote: post #307
a4isms wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to say of Microsoft Word, "Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%." The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate, but the shape of the thing its describing applies to almost every piece of enterprise software whether installed on-prem or SaaS. And as another comment points out, at Enterprise scale you can substitute "team" or "group" for customer. Every team…

>"Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%." >The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users.

A better counterexample is that one user could use all features.

But your statement doesn't make sense; there might be millions of features, and trillions of ways to combine them to make 5%.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#329

Post by Cd00d »

sam0x17 wrote: post #213
throwaway894345 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really like to understand who makes the decision to purchase JIRA. It's like the C++ of ticketing software--it does everything because no one wanted to sit down and think critically about the use cases and instead decided it would be easier to say "yes" to every single feature request. It definitely feels like whoever is buying JIRA is not on the team who is using it (maybe IT or finance) because it ticks the…

And yet, it actually is set up in an extremely opinionated annoying way. For example there is no way to actually assign multiple users to the same ticket, which is a big problem if your org legitimately does pair programming (mine does for juniors)

Why not just clone the ticket?

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#330

Post by david422 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #204
ZetaZero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It would be an impossible nightmare for every account to have their own DB. Hundreds of thousands of accounts and databases....

I worked at company that architected their multi-tenancy in almost exactly this style. In their particular case, only a few of the very largest customers had their database set aside on their own dedicated instance, but every customer did have their own DB with their own set of tables. Having worked in that world (every customer had their own DB) and on a product where all customers had their data intermingled in one…

> I'd definitely encourage the "every customer gets their own DB".

Does this extend to services as well? We have a suite of (micro) services. Are they all segregated?

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