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Don't Be Frupid

selix.net

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Re: Don't Be Frupid

#121

Post by unlogic »

ljm wrote: post #88
cellis wrote: post #29

Was nodding along until "...consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth...". Nothing worse than race conditions and stale data between multiple disparate datastores. I'd rather have one database and more ram for as long as possible, tyvm. Some of the latest nights I've had debugging were at companies with mission critical data spread across multiple databases. I know it's orthogonal to the point, but…

I guess the operative word is 'underpowered'. My low-stakes conspiracy theory though is that cloud providers (and symbiotic entities in the ecosystem) have helped turn developers against monoliths in favour of self-serve microservice architectures and devops because there's a lot more money in it for them when people are spinning up dozens of hermetically sealed, over-provisioned services, each with their own DB, cac…

The term "linear scaling" was invented by cloud companies to sell more cloud.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#122

Post by unlogic »

barkingcat wrote: post #59
Aurornis wrote: post #13

> except no one factors in that without it, engineers will burn hundreds of hours manually wrestling with tasks that a good automation could have handled in minutes I agree with the general concept, but the example in the article are so extremely exaggerated that it’s hard to take the article seriously. A $15 tool that would save hundreds of hours of tasks? A conference visit that would save millions? Anyone who has…

SaaS vendors are insane these days. some really dark patterns: block purchases (for ex. you can only buy 100 licenses, not 49 or 52), mandatory "upgrade" for security features like SSO, mandatory licenses for people signing up for accounts that you didn't specifically ask for, and the worst is asking for the "enterprise" plan (with egregious minimum license counts, even if you just use 50) in order to control / admin…

I believe you, but it would be nice if you called out the exact vendors that do that, for others to be cautious. It's not like their pricing is under NDA, right?

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#123

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

scarface_74 wrote: post #109
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Hacker News. Everyone here has worked for startups.

I’ll leave that spurious idea alone. But, the idea that you can just move workloads to a random VPS and get the same benefits of AWS/Azure/GCP is …naive and shows a lack of understanding of how any real company operates. The last startup I worked for had 60 employees and we hosted microservices that aggregated public and private (to the company not PII) health care data for health care providers. They used them as ba…

What should they be considered then?

For what it’s worth, there are indeed solo operations running on a single VPS with $USD1m+ turnover. What are they? Hobby projects?

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#124

Post by scarface_74 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #123
scarface_74 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll leave that spurious idea alone. But, the idea that you can just move workloads to a random VPS and get the same benefits of AWS/Azure/GCP is …naive and shows a lack of understanding of how any real company operates. The last startup I worked for had 60 employees and we hosted microservices that aggregated public and private (to the company not PII) health care data for health care providers. They used them as ba…

What should they be considered then? For what it’s worth, there are indeed solo operations running on a single VPS with $USD1m+ turnover. What are they? Hobby projects?

And when that VPS goes down? Where are these projects?

In the scenario I listed about my last startup, it would be silly to host those on a bunch of VMs and not use managed services even if they are hosted versions of open source software. The management of infrastructure takes too much time once it gets necessarily complex and doesn’t add. Skid to the business

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#126

Post by roncesvalles »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…

It's about having taste. Some SaaS tools are obviously worth multiples more to your employees than their costs. Same with hardware tools like laptops, monitors etc. I'd throw in catered lunch as another worth-it expense.

It's about knowing which ones are worth it which aren't, rather than having a sweeping policy of either too much or zero bureaucracy to whatever an employee asks for.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#127

Post by roncesvalles »

pdimitar wrote: post #99
hiatus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business travel is not taxable for the employee.

Okay, but how is that a reward? Maybe I wrongfully assumed we were talking about a money / material reward here.

Many big tech companies treat business trips as rewards. Fly business, live in a nice-ish hotel, get meals and taxi comped. It's a little vacation.

One of my early managers (based in Asia) saw his annual two-week business trip to the Bay Area as one of the most valuable perks of the job. He even brought his family along a few times (he paid for their travel obviously, but they probably shared his hotel rooms).

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#128

Post by brailsafe »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #107
pplonski86 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about the tools that you are using. The better the tool, the faster the job is done. I always get the best machine I can afford and never regret it. I'm working with data; I have a desktop machine with 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs; it was expensive, but I can train huge gradient boosting tree models in a reasonable time.

Your response here is exactly what I'm talking about though. For you personally it looks like the choice obviously makes sense given what you're using it for. But I've seen plenty of developers cry that they need 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs to do React front-end development. My fundamental problem with this article is the author is showing they have no idea how business works, money is not infinite, and that if every depa…

> But I've seen plenty of developers cry that they need 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs to do React front-end development.

Seems a bit hyperbolic. I do front-end development, and upgraded from a 5yr old 13" MBP with 16gb of ram to a 16" M4 Pro with 48gb, and a second lesser M3 Pro for a client. Both are fantastic, and probably the minimum I'd bother trying to work with professionally, anything down to M1 Max would likely be fine, but anything older or with less ram might be too sluggish to be palatable, and it would introduce more friction than necessary. There's not much of a direct time savings to be argued for, but plenty of less obvious pain points that just add up and become irritating when there are better tools one could be working with.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#129

Post by djkivi »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #118
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…

With a title like "Don't Be Frupid" it's probably best to set your expectations low.

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