We already have a term for this: false economy. And "cutting the brakes to increase mileage" is a terrible analogy for the examples given. There are instances of that: rolling your own encryption comes to mind. But here the better analogy would be buying cheap shoes that you have to replace much more often.
Don't Be Frupid
81–90 of 134 posts
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#82We already have a term for this: false economy. And "cutting the brakes to increase mileage" is a terrible analogy for the examples given. There are instances of that: rolling your own encryption comes to mind. But here the better analogy would be buying cheap shoes that you have to replace much more often.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#83I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
It is about the tools that you are using. The better the tool, the faster the job is done. I always get the best machine I can afford and never regret it. I'm working with data; I have a desktop machine with 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs; it was expensive, but I can train huge gradient boosting tree models in a reasonable time.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#84I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
Does the author owe you a good, analytical argument? You were able to respond to it with your own experience easily enough. That's usually how conversations like these work.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#85I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
People generally prefer simple messages. Presenting a richly detailed nuanced argument is a recipe for failure.
The biggest problem with that is that simple messages are all lies. Luckily most people would rather embrace a simple but catchy lie.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202...
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#86There was a large company in my city that had around 30 floors of staff and a dedicated full time contractor managing the expensive coffee machines on each floor (running dishwashers, restocking beans/milk, cleaning/servicing the machines etc). Management decided to do away with this role and get rid of the coffee machines to save 1 Full time salary + change. The next week there were 40 staff queuing for coffee at ev…
But maybe it led to more informal hallway meetings which saved time on what would otherwise be phone calls or formal meetings.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#87I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
Does the author owe you a good, analytical argument? You were able to respond to it with your own experience easily enough. That's usually how conversations like these work.
I don't understand what exactly you're criticizing GP for or what you'd like them to do differently. And then: do they owe you whatever you'd like them to do? Do you owe anybody a clearer argument? How many people do I owe time for reading this comment? I feel like you opened a can of mirrors. ;)
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#88Was nodding along until "...consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth...". Nothing worse than race conditions and stale data between multiple disparate datastores. I'd rather have one database and more ram for as long as possible, tyvm. Some of the latest nights I've had debugging were at companies with mission critical data spread across multiple databases. I know it's orthogonal to the point, but…
I guess the operative word is 'underpowered'.
My low-stakes conspiracy theory though is that cloud providers (and symbiotic entities in the ecosystem) have helped turn developers against monoliths in favour of self-serve microservice architectures and devops because there's a lot more money in it for them when people are spinning up dozens of hermetically sealed, over-provisioned services, each with their own DB, cache, load balancer, etc.
It's like corporate welfare, redistributing wealth from VCs to Bezos.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
At one job I had in Sweden, conference trips abroad were a way to give engineers a reward that wasn't taxed at 60-80%. I enjoyed my trips, but I learned very little.
What kinds of rewards were these that are not taxed?
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#90We already have a term for this: false economy. And "cutting the brakes to increase mileage" is a terrible analogy for the examples given. There are instances of that: rolling your own encryption comes to mind. But here the better analogy would be buying cheap shoes that you have to replace much more often.
If it comes from Amazon, which I suspect it does, given a few comments to that effect, then it's because one of Amazon's 'Leadership Principles' is 'Be Frugal'.
These principles get drilled into you repeatedly, through new hire orientation, interviews, etc. In particular, you get evaluated against the principles in your annual review, so it's important to try and find ways to say that you have worked by them.
So when you look around and see everybody trying to apply 'Be Frugal' by penny-pinching on unimportant things, or refusing to buy software and thus spending hundreds of hours in dev time, it's quite natural to rephrase it as 'Being Frupid'.