This is so funny, thank you.
The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
191–200 of 242 posts
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#192How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.
As a engineer I do not have time to get into this new VM/container thing. I fail to see how it leads to anything productive ( no offence ). Call me a simpleton but I am happy with better package management and config systems.
I had similar views, until I did some contract work for distributed systems platform.
I have written a demo app that connects to twitter stream api and pushes data to elasticsearch instance running on Apache Mesos. One thing that struck me was separation of concerns principle, starting containers on a cluster with Marathon and Mesos is such a breeze. No complex deployments or package management, everything is isolated from each other very neatly and thoughtfully. Of course, the complexity is by orders of magnitudes higher and this tech comes with its own bundle of "joy", like maintenance difficulties and monitoring issues, but what new tech doesn't?
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#193The only way to stop this madness is to go on strike against it, as you did. I work very hard to never mention online that I've had anything to do with SharePoint or ColdFusion because it will bring recruiters with a job that will kill you.
The same with Clearcase for me Having it in the job description is bad, having it in the actual job is a complete no-no for me
Or any other IBM software: DOORS, Jazz...
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dtrace was, and still is, awesome. Linux has come a long way in this area in the last few years, but DTrace was one of the hottest systems management capabilities I'd seen in forever, particularly on the very large SMP systems that had become Solaris's sweet spot in those waning years.
Quite. Systemtap is a joke compared to dtrace.
There are reasonable criticisms of Systemtap, but a lot of Sun marketing was just bizarre. They set it up on Ubuntu (which doesn't include it, and which isn't their competitor: Red Hat is) as an example of what the setup is like. They kept complaining it was unsafe, when it was only unsafe if you wanted to use raw C for tapsets. Sun had some great tech, but they were also a sales and marketing machine that had no problems spouting garbage to make a sale.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.
Five characters! Luxury. I learned to program on a system where we only had two. (Not joking: on the Commodore eight bit machines, only the first two characters of variable names were significant.)
In MUMPS, only the first two characters of function names are significant.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.
I can't approve of that attitude. Why not? Most companies that end up with that kind of hardcore legacy code a) refuse to upgrade on a reasonable basis and b) refuse to compensate their developers in proportion to the value they ultimately deliver. So, fuck'em. Might as well enjoy the pseudo pension.
This is in health/medical and the employee in question is nearing retirement. I'd like to think that he should be encouraging them to consider a succession plan ahead of time to minimise risk for the thousands of people likely to be effected by this.
There's a good chance, from my understanding of the situation, that his managers don't understand the situation as well as he does. I think he should think bigger than himself.
Management's decisions are unlikely to be budget related.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, also a well understood technology that they would have no trouble producing.
I bet it's only "well understood" by a very small group of people in 2015. On the other hand, at least it's _possible_ to make your own at home: http://makezine.com/2008/01/07/make-your-own-vacuum-tube/ I somehow doubt there's many talented amateurs assembling MOSFETs in their garages...
Perhaps I should have said "institutional experience", but the number of people creating fighter radars at the time were not exactly numerous.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I maintain one at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html
Oof, I recognize one of those, from an email today. I'd thought I was talking to an internal recruiter... Incidentally, you have some duplicates.
> Incidentally, you have some duplicates.
Nice catch. I guess that either he doesn't check for duplicates or he is doubly irritated by the duplicate ones :P
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#199Aside from the bureaucracy, that actually sounds like a fun job to me, solving obscure problems and working with things almost no one has heard of, instead of churning out and maintaining boring "cookie-cutter" applications. Then again, I do like retrocomputing, reverse-engineering, and the demoscene... I imagined myself in a job interview in 2010, trying to explain how useful my extensive knowledge of Xenix, PL/M bu…
Wouldn't the sheer pointlessness of it all bother you after a while? If someone wanted to pay you to dig a ditch and fill it up again, for the right price, would you do it? I mean, I'm not trying to claim that working for that hot new startup which is going to revolutionize ___ or endlessly tweaking some megacorp's ERP system is necessarily such a boon to humanity, but still.
Most things we do are a little pointless in the end. In the long run, the universe will cool to uniformly distributed inert matter, and all of our efforts will scarcely affect the distribution.
I currently work at big company X doing cutting edge work on the latest rewrite of big system Y, used by millions of people each day. In five years, the next rewrite will begin, and probably within ten years every last line of code I've written will be deprecated and deleted.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#200Would the author mind sharing that tape dump from an old ITS system please?