The Enterprise Experience

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?

In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger systems. When you follow this thread, pretty deep questions start to fall out like "how can I be just in an unjust society?". Or "what's the best way that I, as an individual, can have a positive impact on my community?". Or "Is there any point in trying to change systems given my small role within them?".

To these types of questions there's various different responses and consequences. Some people dive in feet first and engage heavily with the mechanisms they have to enact change (such as local politics, grass roots political movements, activism etc). Some people, overwhelmed by the weight of the system, disengage entirely.

Now to answer your question, I believe in the work that we're doing (or else I probably wouldn't have joined). Career development at the company isn't just more money (though that's obviously a component), it's being given more responsibilities alongside the capacity to enact more and more change.

Faced with a dysfunctional organisation that you're a part of, what do you do? The options as I see it are roughly:

- Change companies, and acknowledge that the dysfunction is insurmountable.

- Do your job and stay at the position you're in.

- Embed deeper into the dysfunctional organisation, with the view that you can be an agent for positive change.

>Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?

To some people, yes. There are people out there that take satisfaction in doing harm. Not me, nor do I believe the work I do is harmful. I didn't think I had to be so granular as to say "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions".

If you work at a real enterprise that actually takes security seriously I can assure you a large portion of it is not theater. You will find this out when they come knocking and point out something boneheaded that happened on your watch. I once had an intern that mistakenly committed a non-prod credential into source control. They realized their mistake and replaced it with a token. But not before it had triggered some infosec alert and they blasted me with a stern “ACTION REQUIRED” email. I also had people on my team get snagged by simulated phishing emails and other such things which are run constantly.

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?

If you want to become a researcher in data science or developper evangelist for instance, you'll need a org that can sustain your work.

Or if you want to be a micro service architect, you'll be booed in a 3 people shop but heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies.

Same for engineering manager paths, it only makes sense if you have the headcount.

> software is bad, or harms

What you work on doesn't need to be Enterprise software. Hopefully it isn't.

> ... Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ... the list of good things at the end of the post.

Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc...

I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible with "large enterprise".

Most weren't.

This wasn't about some Kafkaesque hoops they had jump through while blindfolded and on fire, although I'm sure that's the impression most of them got.

The requirements were simple and perfectly sound architecture principles that they either met or did not meet. If they didn't meet them, then maybe their software was "good enough" for tiny clients, but would never work at scale.

I even made a list, which from memory was something like:

1. Support single-sign-on from external sources such as LDAP, OAuth, whatever. (We're not going to sync our directory and every user password to your insecure garbage software.)

2. Have some sort of audit log. Administrative or configuration changes especially. (Some places have hundreds of admins, not all of whom are fully trusted.)

3. Have an unattended installation process, even if it's just VM cloning or whatever. (I'm not clicking through your GUI wizard 500 times at 3am on Sunday morning.)

4. Allow incremental migrations/upgrades. I.e.: The "easy" process of stop-the-world; one-way-big-bang; start-the-world process is not viable in an enterprise with 10K tenants where the upgrade may or may not work for all of them on the first try.

5. Scale. This can be as simple as having indexes on "user" and "tenant" tables, which is easily overlooked when the typical dev works with a scale of 1 user and 1 tenant. Similarly, using combo boxes / drop downs is a no-go for most fields such as security groups. (We have 700K security groups. No, we can't delete 699.9K as a workaround to make your GUI not crash from an OOM error.)

6. Accessibility is mandatory. With up to 200K permanent and 1 million occasional users, every disability will be represented. Not just vision or hearing problems, but motor-neuron issues, amputees, etc... (You name it, we have someone on staff with it.)

Etc...

Seen in that light, Enterprise software starts to make sense. It's not baroque or malicious, it's just taken on a certain form to suit a purpose.

For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.

Disagree that it's written in lawsuits, it's written to please every customer under the sun and due to this, code base has become Rube Goldberg machine that few people understand.