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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

zarar.dev

281–286 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#281
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless you are the manufacturer for your own goods, then you are competing on often-thin margins within a crowded industry with lots of competition where everyone more-or-less offers the same price. That's not true. You don't have to manufacture your own goods to not compete with others at a commodity level. It's quite literally why branding is so important. But I do find it funny you wound up doing exactly what the…

> It's quite literally why branding is so important. Most of the goods you purchase are from brands not owned by the retail website. Pick a hobby and consider the prominent brands, then consider the prominent websites people in that hobby often patronize - they are very often not the same. > and are acting like this is a world ending event for a small-medium sized ecommerce site to be down for a while Because it kind…

> Websites don't have "business hours"

depends what you're selling, and there's always the chance that someone is up at 4am their time, but if the page was down from 11pm to 6am every day for a mainstream physical product, they'd probably not lose too many sales.

unfortunately, losing a sale puts a business into a tizzy, to they tend to react poorly to that thought. it's because it's easy enough to leave the computer running unattended over night that business hours aren't a thing that websites are in that spot, but watching the traffic flows while on the Internet traffic team at Google on top of some emotional development, means that for a small bespoke business, SLAs don't even have have any nines for that business to remain in business.

we're biased to by the very nature of us commenting on an Internet website, but there are still customers out there that don't use the Internet on a daily basis.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#282
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the worst mistakes that I saw were from over-reaction in an active incident. One of my programming mantras is "no black magic." If I don't understand why something works, then it's not done. I take this same approach to an incident. If someone can't coherently identify why their suggestion will have an impact, I don't think they should do it. Now there may come a time that you need to just pull the trigger on…

> One of my programming mantras is "no black magic." This. * 1000 I am very grateful that my earliest training was as an RF bench technician. It taught me how to find and fix really weird problems, without freaking out. However, it does appear that this particular event may have been caused by reliance on a dependency that may not have merited that reliance. I'm really, really careful about dependencies. That's an at…

Wow, another RF/electronics tech turned SWE? How many of us do you think there are?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#283
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my programming mantras is "no black magic." This. * 1000 I am very grateful that my earliest training was as an RF bench technician. It taught me how to find and fix really weird problems, without freaking out. However, it does appear that this particular event may have been caused by reliance on a dependency that may not have merited that reliance. I'm really, really careful about dependencies. That's an at…

Wow, another RF/electronics tech turned SWE? How many of us do you think there are?

Not too many.

But debugging RF stuff is hairy AF, so it’s a great forge for making problem solvers.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#284
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world would be a better place when airlines and ISPs worked that way too. (Roads work is usually communicated well in advance) Downtime for these is critically impacting people, and you're damn right you should explain what went wrong and how you'll avoid this in the future. Because the only reasonable alternative is nationalizing them. "I dun fucked up, but meh" is not an acceptable attitude.

> "I dun fucked up, but meh" is not an acceptable attitude. I'm cool with it. I don't care that some hard drive went bad and the monitoring system didn't pick up on it because some queue was full. Who cares? If this isn't happening constantly, I assume they're going to learn their lesson.

> "I assume they're going to learn their lesson."

That's pretty much the opposite of "but meh". Absolutely, mistakes happen, they aren't the end of the world, but they need to trigger a learning process. Looking at airlines and ISPs, that process is, in the most charitable viewing, processing glacially.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#286
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you even bother to work if you have 2M ?

Doesn't help you much if you are a family in Bay Area.

Of course I'm a random person on the internet and you haven't asked for my advice.

Just saying -- kids pick up languages real fast, friendship treaties and tax benefits are abundant and with 2M you can shop around for a better lifestyle if you really want to not have that stress and fear, unless you are determined to become filthy rich, I ofc don't know you.

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