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Don't Be Frupid

selix.net

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Re: Don't Be Frupid

#51

Post by croes »

solatic wrote: post #49
albert_e wrote: post #3

> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…

I agree that conferences like re:Invent are a waste of time and money on the HN crowd, who are anyway self-motivated continuous learner types. But the vast majority of large company payrolls are stacked with 9-5 types who clock in, clock out, go home to spend time on anything not related to their job. These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot, etc. If a…

> 9-5 types who clock in, clock out, go home to spend time on anything not related to their job. These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot,

I think you mix two types of employees. There is nothing wrong with being a 9-5 guy. Doesn’t mean they don’t inform themselves on HN etc.

Your example sounds more like the type who just does what they’re told and nothing more. I don't know if this type would benefit from a conference or if a learning course wouldn't be more suitable.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#52

Post by scarface_74 »

udev4096 wrote: post #17

> Cutting cloud costs This has so many angles to it. You can't just generalize cloud costs. You can stop using bloated JS frameworks to make up for the inflated application costs. You can switch to OVH or Hetzner or better yet, on-prem. It's like you are asking everyone to just give in to horrible tactics of AWS

I bet you think all people do is spin up a bunch of VMs on AWS or the other cloud providers.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#53

Post by scarface_74 »

calmbonsai wrote: post #32

Who the hell is routinely flying multi-hop for business travel?!

Everyone who doesn’t live near a hub. I use to fly out of ATL where I only did a layover for a domestic flight once in my life to Santa Barbara and even that is a direct flight now.

I now fly out of MCO where my choices are a layover or maybe flying Southwest. I don’t hate myself enough to deal with that “We are Sparta” boarding process.

Besides, I’m platinum Medallion on Delta…

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#54

Post by fragmede »

udev4096 wrote: post #20
albert_e wrote: post #3

> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…

These conferences are nothing but a waste of time. There is hardly any value to it. Instead go to USENIX, NDSS, all-systems-go, linux plumbers event, fosdem, and a bunch of other community driven confs

But then you're just nitpicking on which conference to go to. Places I've worked had a broad education budget that let the employee choose which conference they'd prefer to attend.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#55

Post by B-Con »

A lot of things are worth paying for. A lot aren't.

The hard thing is knowing which ones are which. You can't see the benefit in advance.

A lot of things aren't worth paying for. A lot of software licenses go completely unused. A lot of conference attendees hang out with friends and learn nothing useful. A lot of modern hardware is spent editing CSS files.

The engineers exaggerate and say everything is useful because they don't want to lose any perks. The accountants exaggerate the other direction because their job is to protect cash flow and they have no clue what's useful.

Budget makers are often stuck in the middle: too far up to know what's practically useful but close enough that they know they need to make some investment.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#56

Post by praptak »

zeroCalories wrote: post #24

I think the main problem is that measuring a lot of these things is incredibly hard. The post mentioned laptops and build time and it reminded me of a blog post[1] trying to figure out if it's worth upgrading to m3 macbooks. I encorage you to read the post yourself, but my impression is that the whole project was a huge waste of time. I suspect most attempts to measure impact will end this way. I also think a lot of…

Measuring the fallout being hard is one problem. The other is organizational - when the unit that owns the savings is separate from the one that bears the costs, they have no motivation to consider the costs.

Their spreadsheets look good after all.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#57

Post by decimalenough »

I first heard the word "frupidity" from friends at Amazon, where this seems to be quite common. Examples include prohibiting buying business class tickets, even if discounted, so people buy more expensive full fare economy tickets instead and upgrade cheaply off that with points.

Business travel in general seems to be rich hunting grounds for frupidity, because the bean counters aren't the ones traveling. The good old "can't expense anything without a receipt" policy, for example, ensures people will take expensive taxis (with receipts!) instead of tapping on and off public transport.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#58

Post by decimalenough »

Aurornis wrote: post #18
albert_e wrote: post #3

> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…

> say, sponsoring your employees' visits to conferences shows that you treat them well, care about their personal learning and growth, and inturn motivates them to look for synergies between their interests and work As much as I’ve enjoyed employer-sponsored conferences in the past, I have to be honest that it seems like very few people are there to learn and come up with ways to help their employers. It feels like a…

Pretty much the only reason companies sponsor developer conferences is for the right to get a table on the floor, so they can recruit attendees.

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#59

Post by barkingcat »

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 accounts (so you can audit for exited employees, etc).

the pattern is usually like you said, someone tries a tool for $10/month, and then gets their team on it, which let's say is 10 people. not bad. Then it gets out on the grapevine and other teams want to try - goes to 50 people ok still ok.

but then the sass vendor start using dark patterns and all of a sudden you're getting a bill for 1000 accounts (sorry, can't sell you any less!) at the "enterprise" price of $100/account/month.

and now you're fighting with the sass company to actually disable accounts of people who left instead of just keeping it "greyed out" but still visible, you just can't log in and can't control it ....

Re: Don't Be Frupid

#60

Post by Qwertious »

solatic wrote: post #49
albert_e wrote: post #3

> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…

I agree that conferences like re:Invent are a waste of time and money on the HN crowd, who are anyway self-motivated continuous learner types. But the vast majority of large company payrolls are stacked with 9-5 types who clock in, clock out, go home to spend time on anything not related to their job. These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot, etc. If a…

>I agree that conferences like re:Invent are a waste of time and money on the HN crowd, who are anyway self-motivated continuous learner types.

I assure you, HN has plenty of us stupid, lazy and incompetent people.

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