311–320 of 335 posts
I 100% agree as a consultant working in product development. I think what drives this is a lack of ability for anyone to understand the end-to-end product from a technical standpoint and make coordinated decisions about direction. Instead, you have 30 teams with their own architects and roadmaps (which often overlap functionality) so you build the same thing 5 times across the org, then 3 of them end up drawing meani…
Lately, as I get older, I see the point he is trying to make in his own odd way. The way computers have always been a dismal disappointment to him, how they always seem defective or faulty and never quite "there."
Why doesn't shit just work and stay working? Entropy?
I currently work for a Fortune 10 and I'll bet $100 something major breaks this holiday weekend simply because the baby sitters are not there this week. It shouldn't be like that, but it is. It has been that way as long as I can remember, too.
So is this all just a giant scam, then? Hell if I know. I've learned a dozen programming languages, half a dozen database products, when I first started out I was a sysadmin and had to know all the ins and outs of about five or six different UNIX products (before Linux arrived).
At one point I did work with Struts, then .NET for a bit, then Spring. Every single time I had to listen to this or that recruiter tell me I wasn't qualified on that particular framework or whatever so they could wheedle me on pay.
Now I work on "big data" which means Kafka, Cassandra, and Kubernetes; a bunch of beautiful, massively expensive hype. I'm currently wondering if our business will pull the plug on this project simply due to the storage costs involved compared to whatever they're getting out of it (hint: not much).
Should have become an Optometrist, a Podiatrist, or just taught math...
I'm a recovering security guy. When I listen to security people rant, I can see their points and it's a bit of fun, I like a good rant. But I get the impression that they're continuously discovering new and exciting ways that individual facets of individual pieces of software (and the processes around them) suck. All without ever accepting that the entirety of the software ecosystem sucks (and that they're rarely mov…
Not really security, but regarding software in general, Mud is one of the reasons I gravitated torwards pure FP languages. It doesn't solve everything, but the added guarantees help shift some of the cognitive burden away from having to dig into every method to have to see what's going on, and I can spend that mental budget elsewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really do not understand people. Well, then learning more about people's psychology and motivations seems like a thing you could benefit from immediately :)
I realise people don't care. I don't understand how they can so freely ignore that this has consequences and not always even long term ones. Given that I do recognise people won't change, would it help if I did learn to understand their builtin magic curtain / SEP field[0]? I ask with no hope any more, what do you advise? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field
Being acceptant of that has the upside that you don't need to know the background of a given individual (some people have a rough life, others just don't think they will get it e.g. think they are not smart enough, others are just working 400% and have kids), to accept the fact that they will just use tech and maybe don't care about the inner workings. But is that really a bad thing? Because that's exactly how they are built know adays, ease of use.
I have people around me that I want to explain basic things in life to, but.. even if they actually listen their previous argument float to the surface the next day. People need to change themselves.
In the other end of the park there's a big playground. That's where I sit and design the biggest sand castle I've ever built. I don't care that much about running around, I switch playground when I have too.
Each mindset have their pros and cons. I solve stuff that takes a bit of effort. My SO keeps our life/house running.
So respect and acceptance about others choices is a great way to let go of anger that nobody is interested in the things you are interested in. Finding someone with the same mindset in real life is rare, even on HN. How cool is that?
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Docker has its own security nightmares and mis-designs -- for instance, are you using user namespaces? With LXC and LXD user namespaces are the default (and unlike Docker's design, they can use different ID mappings which blocks inter-container attacks). There are plenty of other missteps I can think of. (I am a maintainer of runc and have contributed to Docker for a long time, as well as collaborated with the LXC fo…
I love lxc/lxd. Its really a shame that there is little to no interest by the lxd team in supporting the oci container format.
I am actually working on improving the current state of OCI images[1] by using a snapshot-based tree structure -- which will also solve many problems we have in OCI that are independent from LXD. But it is possible that the LXD folks would be more interested if the OCI format more closely matched what they need.
Though it should be noted that LXC has had an OCI template for several years now[2] (and it actually uses a tool I wrote -- umoci -- to extract the OCI image).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbTxdzbjv7I [2]: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/blob/lxc-3.2.1/templates/lxc-oci....
Basically everyone wants security, but nobody wants to pay for it. Maybe the market equilibrium means people don't get hurt enough yet.
Miserable in the sense that customers don't care, you have to be paranoid and brilliant at the same time, it can be weeks without an emotional payoff, yet everything is always urgent but rarely important.
Having watched some conference videos on the topic, the bro-toxicity is still strong in that field, too.
The bad news is that this will happen everywhere where you work for someone else, especially in large companies. And this cannot be avoided while working as an employee, it's part of the system. The good news is that there is one way to avoid this (the only way AFIK) is to start your own company, there you get to call all the shots for good or for bad. It doesn't have to be a big company though, it can be just you an…
So cynical. First of all, we live in an imperfect world, so there always needs to be a search for balance. No company is perfect, and if it were, we'd be out of a job, so to speak. The balance needs to be that there are enough things going well enough, for you not to get burned down (burned out, pissed off). Enough of the "problems" must be challenges, and actionable, and still excite you to solve them. If this is no…
You will be stuck with an old slow PC trying to fix some issue until midnight, and that just takes a heavy toll on people.
As things can't work well, there is a lot of responsibility deflection going on, it would be naive to think otherwise.
Also, a lot of these posts in HN assume that the only way to live is to work as an employee for someone else, under similar conditions.
It's important to realize that there are other professional options available, which many people won't even consider.
For your option list, I've seen a lot of 1. As for 2, there are lot more bad companies than good ones, and you can't tell from the interview process and can't also change each 2 months.
As for 3, half the workforce would switch jobs then. The problem is not the people, it's the system.
I would add 4, do contract work and stay while the balance of the good things / bad things about the job make it worth it, then do something else after a year or two when it doesn't.
This relates to 2, sometimes a company is the right company in the beginning, but it's no longer the case later on. For example, I bet you won't work there forever.
The bad news is that this will happen everywhere where you work for someone else, especially in large companies. And this cannot be avoided while working as an employee, it's part of the system. The good news is that there is one way to avoid this (the only way AFIK) is to start your own company, there you get to call all the shots for good or for bad. It doesn't have to be a big company though, it can be just you an…
I couldn't disagree more. I work for the government (in R&D) of all places (about as close as possible to the opposite of working for myself IMO) and I don't feel this at all. I have near-total control over my work environment. If I need something, all I have to do is articulate why I need it and I will get it or get a precise technical explanation of why I can't have it.
These days it's doable to at least get a second monitor. But for things such as an SSD drive? At least a couple of years ago it was nearly impossible.
The reason why burnout is frequent, is because in general in most places work conditions are bad and stressful. In my view the problem is the system and not the people.
Your professional setting seems like a good example of how it doesn't have to be like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is somebody who watches people draw in their youtube channels interested in drawing, or in watching people draw? I'd say it's the latter.
Are the billions of people who watch sportsball even capable of playing whatever variety of sportsball?
Every feature and improvement goes through the same cycle:
- Sales come with user stories/feedback
- Boss distort the needs and comes up with a solution that's good for nobody
- The engineering team tries to reason the boss into meeting the actual needs and fails 9 times out of 10 because he knows better
- The feature is carefully designed to be as secure, user friendly and efficient as possible
- Boss ruins the UX and security by inventing ridiculous constraints, sometime saying that we can improve on it later
- Insecure and user hostile feature get released in the next software version
Of course boss and sales advertise the product as the next generation of cyber security product, better than anything already out there. I've not been working here for a long time but I know I will get tired of this stuff very quickly.