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My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
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Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people often convince themselves that becoming a manager is a path for those who couldn’t hack it. In reality it’s a completely different set of problems. If you’re a decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very good chance you’d be better in management or sales than writing code.
In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo cult activities mostly involving power point presentations and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend went towards satisfying the VP’s appetite for reporting when engineers were very understaffed they focused on expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring ICs. some of this m…
I think the role of managers should be facilitating productivity. If things are in peoples way, help them.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people often convince themselves that becoming a manager is a path for those who couldn’t hack it. In reality it’s a completely different set of problems. If you’re a decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very good chance you’d be better in management or sales than writing code.
My own observation is that it's more important for managers to be well-organized, remember details, and keep track of things Not sure if that's what you mean by soft skills, but I generally think of soft skills as things like ability to communicate well, navigate conflict, and apply emotional intelligence to people management The "soft skills" as I understand them are more important for roles like team lead/staff, wh…
I think there are different kinds of manager positions. Some require excellent soft skills, some require excellent bean-counting skills, etc.
A bit like how there are different kinds of programmer positions.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#44> and begin real investigation you will quickly find that many databases that are popular are totally fine losing data. MongoDB being the most famous example that I can think off of the top of my head.
Always pisses me off. University teaches the principles of ACID and how hard databases work to adhere to these principles, and then so called "NoSQL" comes along and says "lol we have eventual consistency".
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#45> and begin real investigation you will quickly find that many databases that are popular are totally fine losing data. MongoDB being the most famous example that I can think off of the top of my head. Always pisses me off. University teaches the principles of ACID and how hard databases work to adhere to these principles, and then so called "NoSQL" comes along and says "lol we have eventual consistency".
The heat death of the universe is eventually consistent.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely can do this, though obviously it can details wrong here and there. For example: Describe what this code does in clear english: from datetime import datetime import pytz utcmoment_naive = datetime.utcnow() utcmoment = utcmoment_naive.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc) # print "utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive) # python 2 print("utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive)) print("utcmoment: {0}".forma…
So you’re telling me if one writes a plug-in that integrates with source control checkins and provides these summaries plus an additional terser summary to nontechnical users, I wonder if companies would buy that?
Makes sense to me.
Add things like "summary of what each contributor did each week/month" at various levels of detail.
There is an evil and a less evil way to deploy this of course. I have had jobs where I had to provide monthly summaries of what I did this month. I would like to start with a chatgpt summary of all my commits and/or PR's over the month, before editing it, why not?
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#47The author makes a good progression in their reasoning but then somehow arrives to the wrong conclusion: > So when someone says that Amazon has invested a lot of money into security I think about the fact that Ubisoft spent $1M on a backup solution that didn’t work for the game that would have had the best use of it. The missing point here is thst ubisoft is/was spending money for something outside of its domain of e…
The whole post is clickbait. The million dollar solution was to store source code that they never ever wanted to lose. It (presumably) worked for that. What it didn't work for was backing up user profiles and being able to quickly restore them.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#48My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-directed. He can't understand technical issues, and whenever he proposes something, it's completely untenable due to his lack of understanding what's useful or possible.
It is definitely possible they indeed don't do anything.
Fwiw though - a decade ago when I was a sysadmin I had a manager that I was certain never did anything.
And then he was replaced.
And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/
Not saying it's the case with your manager. But managers have duties roles and priorities I for one hadn't always appreciated.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#49My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-directed. He can't understand technical issues, and whenever he proposes something, it's completely untenable due to his lack of understanding what's useful or possible.
I'm beginning to think that making more money by becoming a better developer is hard, and that managing, while difficult in a totally different way, is less hard. At least for the money.
That is generally true. In most companies it’s way easier to get promoted to a certain salary level in the management track. From my experience the ceiling on the technical track is way lower than on the management track for people with similar levels of competence.
Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo cult activities mostly involving power point presentations and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend went towards satisfying the VP’s appetite for reporting when engineers were very understaffed they focused on expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring ICs. some of this m…
I think the role of managers should be facilitating productivity. If things are in peoples way, help them.
In reality in most larger companies managers mainly do reporting. There is not much emphasis on productivity.