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The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

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Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#21

Post by paganel »

nlawalker wrote: post #17
tw1010 wrote: post #2

There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar th…

Joel Spolsky talks about this (as a somewhat adversarial tactic, even if it's not purposely so) in "Fire and Motion"[1] "Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward? Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperat…

This post made be nostalgic for that period which started in 2002-2003 (just after the dot-com crash ) up to 2008-2009 (when FB and Twitter emerged and when Google "changed" its skin to a full ad company), when everything worth reading was being published on blogs, when people (myself included) still believed in the open web (we were all very busy bashing SOAP) and when it wasn't all about IPOs and earning obscene amounts of money (it's also the period when this website was put online and when its founder was just a respected blogger, LISP-er and former Yahoo employee). Good times.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#22

Post by crankylinuxuser »

lomnakkus wrote: post #18
drdaeman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can be frustrating, but it’s also unavoidable. Why unavoidable? It's not that one is forced to use some tech... Even though the hyped crowd chants the names so loudly. A lot of things that complex technology offers are not really needed (not to mention one has to constantly fight with that new complex technology when it doesn't yet do something). And complex tech can be frequently replaced with a small set of ti…

(I haven't read the rest of your post, but I think I can still answer this little snippet...) > Why unavoidable? It's not that one is forced to use some tech... Even though the hyped crowd chants the names so loudly. Peer pressure. Consultant-hiring-pressure, for example: Are you full-stack? "Full stack", now there's a phrase... (EDIT: I honestly do feel that it's a sort of an attack by the sheer meta on the hiring s…

"Yeah, he's a few PDF's shy of a full stack, I tell ya!"

side story:

Yeah, I went through 3 stages of hiring with $company. Interviews went great, and then I hear back that I didn't show up to the 3rd (much to my surprise). When the HR person checked back in, they said it was an error and instead they were no longer interested in me because I lacked Kubernetes experience specifically.

And my resume includes Openstack and Apache Mesos. Not Kuber. But they dragged me around. Still pisses me off that they couldn't read my resume. Then again, their interview process was... shall we say, "interesting".

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#23

Post by jstimpfle »

lkrubner wrote: post #3
tw1010 wrote: post #2

There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar th…

I wish I could give you more upvotes. You are describing a somewhat hidden psychology, which I think provides a rational basis for much of "Not Invented Here" psychology. We tend to think that "Not Invented Here" psychology is irrational, but in fact, the loss of control over possibly crucial technology is an important cost, which makes all of us stop and re-consider whether we really want to use some software develo…

And it's not only that - Time spent not doing our own designs (and instead spent memorizing how to use magical frameworks) is time not spent advancing our technical understanding.

It's a sad state when otherwise very intelligent people think it's bad practice to use plain C and a clean OS API that has been stable for decades (because that was somehow "magic" und impossible to understand and error-prone), and advise you to use the Boost filesystem module just to concatenate two paths.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#24

Post by mbrumlow »

Every time a new framework or tool comes out and everybody jumps on it. I always wonder if somebody will realize that you are trading one set of problems and work for another.

As engineers we really need to stop supporting these sort of effort and take the time to help each other become better engineers that write and maintain our own code. We need to promote learning and mastering the underlying concepts that things like kubernetes tries to hide and shield engineers from.

In most cases tools like kubernetes are so vast and huge so they can be the solution looking for many problems.

It is also curious how once kubernetes became big how many small shops needed "Google" level orchestration to manage a hand full of systems. And how hard people ripped their software stack apart into many many micro services just to increase the container count.

I think if most engineers took a step back and said "I don't know" and took some time to truly understand the requirements of the project they are working on they would find a truly elegant and maintainable solution that did not require tweaking your problem to fit a given solution.

Every tool and library / dependency you add to your solution is only adding more code and complications that you will not be a expert in and one day will find your self at the whim of the provider.

Far to often do we include tens of thousands of lines of code of somebody else's work all for a handful of lines of code that if somebody would have had the confidence and support from other engineers around to try and truly understand the problem domain could have implemented and owned the solution.

The general trend I see as I get older is that we are valuing the first to a solution rather than a more correct solution. Only to be stuck with a solution that requires constant care and work around.

So I plead to all engineers, devlopers, programmers or whatever you call your self. Please stop and take a moment and think hard about how you would solve any given problem without the use of external code first. Then compare your solution to the off the shelf "solution looking for a problem". You might surprise your self.

I will also like to point out that if when solving a problem your solution looks like a shopping list of third party tools libraries and services; you might not fully understand the problem domain.

-- sorry for the rant --

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#25

Post by enraged_camel »

lkrubner wrote: post #3
tw1010 wrote: post #2

There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar th…

I wish I could give you more upvotes. You are describing a somewhat hidden psychology, which I think provides a rational basis for much of "Not Invented Here" psychology. We tend to think that "Not Invented Here" psychology is irrational, but in fact, the loss of control over possibly crucial technology is an important cost, which makes all of us stop and re-consider whether we really want to use some software develo…

Sure, NIH syndrome can be rational for technology that is crucial/central to your system.

The problem is it is often used to justify re-inventing even mundane stuff. I once worked with a client who wanted to implement their own bug tracking system. The client’s main product was something totally unrelated.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#26

Post by kakarot »

jstimpfle wrote: post #23
lkrubner wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could give you more upvotes. You are describing a somewhat hidden psychology, which I think provides a rational basis for much of "Not Invented Here" psychology. We tend to think that "Not Invented Here" psychology is irrational, but in fact, the loss of control over possibly crucial technology is an important cost, which makes all of us stop and re-consider whether we really want to use some software develo…

And it's not only that - Time spent not doing our own designs (and instead spent memorizing how to use magical frameworks) is time not spent advancing our technical understanding. It's a sad state when otherwise very intelligent people think it's bad practice to use plain C and a clean OS API that has been stable for decades (because that was somehow "magic" und impossible to understand and error-prone), and advise y…

The most valuable skill is knowing when to externalize your tools. You don't always want to reinvent the wheel every time you need something, when you have deadlines to consider.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#27

Post by maxxxxx »

I think this is a symptom of the "release often" philosophy. With yearly or longer releases you could actually keep up and read the release notes. With stuff being released several times a year it's too much work to keep up unless you are deeply into it at the moment.

I notice the same with my Android apps. I used to read release notes of new versions but now I have it on auto update and am sometimes surprised that an app I have been using all the time has completely changed and I don't know how to use it anymore.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#28

Post by m_ke »

tw1010 wrote: post #2

There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar th…

Same thing in deep learning. I already had to dump half of my code because of theano, as well as api changes in keras and tensorflow that made it a pain to load some of my old models in newer versions of the frameworks.

Now I'm rewriting a bunch of it in pytorch while anxiously waiting for 0.4 to come out (no idea when) and break all of my models again.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#29

Post by 2sk21 »

paganel wrote: post #21
nlawalker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel Spolsky talks about this (as a somewhat adversarial tactic, even if it's not purposely so) in "Fire and Motion"[1] "Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward? Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperat…

This post made be nostalgic for that period which started in 2002-2003 (just after the dot-com crash ) up to 2008-2009 (when FB and Twitter emerged and when Google "changed" its skin to a full ad company), when everything worth reading was being published on blogs, when people (myself included) still believed in the open web (we were all very busy bashing SOAP) and when it wasn't all about IPOs and earning obscene am…

Absolutely agree. Its been ages since I used by RSS aggregator to read blogs the way I used to.

Re: The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

#30

Post by avaer »

tw1010 wrote: post #2

There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar th…

I just call it an ad. It is after all the core competency of the prominent stewards of open source.

The software is the ad, the tangential service is the product; keeping up is the infinite sales call that requires no calls.

This is the price of free.

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