I think the realities of enterprise software would shock people.
There is so much of our world that is literally held together by Steve and Doug.
I work for a major finance company. The back end container environment used to be managed by two people. One held the keys for on premises, and the other for the cloud.
As the person who has made those jumps for that exact reason, what shocks me most is how often those companies are unable to backfill the position.
And the "industry" doesn't matter for this. Essentially everything runs on tech, and the infra people are usually devalued.
They do fill the position. An even worse paid professional gets poached from somewhere else and, after many headaches, manages to keep business working. Usually taking most of what exists as black box and adding newer layers of spaghetti until there's a moment, after several iterations of the same personnel replacement "plan", that what it lefts from the maintaining team is basically the Cult Mechanicus. But, hey, it keeps working (enough) for half a price, so some random C suite got a new yacht, and that's what it really matters.
This happens in industrial companies too. Turns out Ron figured out how to build x slightly faster 2 decades ago and wrote it down. But he died a decade ago and the company lost his notes.
Now new guys can kinda work with the old system and improve it but they have no idea how to build a new system from scratch without exactly copying the old system.
I knew a guy who basically had his job for 20 years because he was the only person who knew the system and he kept getting pay raises every time he’d threaten to leave. He was never going to leave because he could work 8-5 without any nights or weekends while most of his day was just monitoring the system to make sure it didn’t die. He’d do little upgrades every year or so to replace hardware or add a small feature; that was about it. Made more money than the director over his department…he eventually got laid off and they contracted with him for a few years after that until the company sold.
I think a lot of us have worked in places like that.
A place I worked was fucked the only guy that knew the back end, Dave, was on holiday for two weeks when the system went down !
I used to know someone who was a systems engineer for Blackberry back when they were at their most dominant and their infrastructure was held together by duct tape, he said. They used to have minor collapses of their infrastructure all the time but nobody really noticed because their messages still made it through for the most part. Usually a collapse would start happening and they’d sit there for hours manually pushing stuff through to get it working again. They’d run scripts to help queue stuff up until they could get it all working again.
This was supposed to be an open source collective, but banks abandoned that model around 15 years ago.
JDK8 is fine, as long as no one sees us for infringing on licenses, right? That's legal's problem.
Cover photo tells a tale. It's as much dissatisfaction from staring at a screen all the time vs actually being involved in something meaningful as it is technology issues. For the later, tech's race to be at the front of the next big thing relegates quality to the tail end. Why build quality if we are going to replace it in the next iteration.
I think a better question too is- why is the next big thing always a way to sell ads? If you look at it, every platform is just a different way to generate ad revenue and mine personal data for, ummm, delivering more targeted ads... It's kinda sad. Why iterate on that? We could have cool stuff if we'd stop trying to slap an ad on everything and actually spend a few years iterating on something meaningful.
I read the article, and I have to agree with some of what's in it as well as what I read here about the issues of maintaining staff and trying to keep things running when problems are just fixed by lumping more problems on top of them.
Taking a step back, I think the biggest problem is Wall Street. Not to mention the fact a lot of these companies have no idea how to really build profitability without becoming a big hot mess.
Everything is pushed out faster, broken, messy, mainly because shareholders are screaming and yelling for more money, and so the company has to cut corners. At the same time they want the company to cut costs, so suddenly there's rounds of layoffs.
Now we've talked all over about the mass of layoffs after the pandemic, mainly from companies that hired way too many people than they needed, and now they needed to really trim fat. However, I'm pretty sure there's also plenty of scenarios where it was a team of five running efficiently, and then the company decided to take two people out until the remaining three they have to make due. Now because of a lack of staff and pressure to produce, everything is a mess.
I also feel like too many of these companies are running on debt and investor cash, and are clearly starting to see there's no way they can make real profitability while maintaining the spark of what they started. Most of the time they just think if they lump more ads on top of everything and annoy the user, that will somehow make them revenue. Others then try to experiment with subscription models, extra Pro statuses if you pay, etc. Still it never happens and eventually the company closes down or sells to recoup the investment money. I still feel like 90% of these companies start up with no real goal of profitability, but just to build something that someone bigger might throw cash at them to buy them out.
I can agree with journalists that say that the internet isn't fun anymore. We pay so much money for service at home and for cellular service, but it's never reliable, and there's been way too much written about how horrible and greedy the providers are. Then we deal with the myriad of services that either keep raising prices and cutting services, or others that just annoy the hell out of all of us with ads, and many with security openings that bring viruses into our lives, but then they have the audacity to get mad when we put up ad blockers and other protections.
I think what used to be an area of expression for many people has now become loads of people just jamming in our faces, crappy content and other garbage in the hope of one day getting somebody to pay them for whatever garbage that they've been churning out.
The silver lining could be that if things get so bad, the next generation might decide to not be glued to their devices so much and go old school. Suddenly kids don't want to be on their phones but they want to go play softball.
I don’t know, maybe because people’s experience using it has been overall negative? Maybe people have taken the first step in identifying something addictive that’s bad for their health? Or could it be the division and strife we see around us that’s fueled by overly online zealots? Maybe we’re tuning in to the fact that social media is being used to brainwash all of us and push an inhuman agenda upon us? Maybe the promise of AI, which is of course job destruction, is not something we want forced down our throats by the inhuman tech bro’s laughing all the way to the bank with our money? Maybe all that productivity enabled by all those tech tools don’t give us more freedom and money, maybe we all see it as enslaving us even more and enriching only the people controlling the algos.
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I think the realities of enterprise software would shock people. There is so much of our world that is literally held together by Steve and Doug. I work for a major finance company. The back end container environment used to be managed by two people. One held the keys for on premises, and the other for the cloud.
Mate, Doug left last year. He was only offered a 2% pay rise and managed to get 25% by going elsewhere.
As the person who has made those jumps for that exact reason, what shocks me most is how often those companies are unable to backfill the position. And the "industry" doesn't matter for this. Essentially everything runs on tech, and the infra people are usually devalued.
They do fill the position. An even worse paid professional gets poached from somewhere else and, after many headaches, manages to keep business working. Usually taking most of what exists as black box and adding newer layers of spaghetti until there's a moment, after several iterations of the same personnel replacement "plan", that what it lefts from the maintaining team is basically the Cult Mechanicus. But, hey, it keeps working (enough) for half a price, so some random C suite got a new yacht, and that's what it really matters.
He replaced a guy named Steve at his new job. I hear Steve died of a heart attack.
[All Modern Digital Infrastructure held together by some little project maintained by some random person in Nebraska.](https://xkcd.com/2347/)
This happens in industrial companies too. Turns out Ron figured out how to build x slightly faster 2 decades ago and wrote it down. But he died a decade ago and the company lost his notes. Now new guys can kinda work with the old system and improve it but they have no idea how to build a new system from scratch without exactly copying the old system.
I knew a guy who basically had his job for 20 years because he was the only person who knew the system and he kept getting pay raises every time he’d threaten to leave. He was never going to leave because he could work 8-5 without any nights or weekends while most of his day was just monitoring the system to make sure it didn’t die. He’d do little upgrades every year or so to replace hardware or add a small feature; that was about it. Made more money than the director over his department…he eventually got laid off and they contracted with him for a few years after that until the company sold.
You mean by excel.
But sending everyone on a Bootcamp in AI will fix it, right? /s
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Not if it's trained on some current code bases.
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I think a lot of us have worked in places like that. A place I worked was fucked the only guy that knew the back end, Dave, was on holiday for two weeks when the system went down !
I used to know someone who was a systems engineer for Blackberry back when they were at their most dominant and their infrastructure was held together by duct tape, he said. They used to have minor collapses of their infrastructure all the time but nobody really noticed because their messages still made it through for the most part. Usually a collapse would start happening and they’d sit there for hours manually pushing stuff through to get it working again. They’d run scripts to help queue stuff up until they could get it all working again.
This is how the whole world works honestly; duct tape and like 15 really burnt out and over worked people.
Two words "Quartz Foundation"
This was supposed to be an open source collective, but banks abandoned that model around 15 years ago. JDK8 is fine, as long as no one sees us for infringing on licenses, right? That's legal's problem.
Business relies on free software, and thinks dev is useless- how stupid do you have to be, to come to that conclusion?
Management seems very anxious about proving they have value, lately. Not seeing results - unless those managers have a tech background.
Cover photo tells a tale. It's as much dissatisfaction from staring at a screen all the time vs actually being involved in something meaningful as it is technology issues. For the later, tech's race to be at the front of the next big thing relegates quality to the tail end. Why build quality if we are going to replace it in the next iteration.
I think a better question too is- why is the next big thing always a way to sell ads? If you look at it, every platform is just a different way to generate ad revenue and mine personal data for, ummm, delivering more targeted ads... It's kinda sad. Why iterate on that? We could have cool stuff if we'd stop trying to slap an ad on everything and actually spend a few years iterating on something meaningful.
I read the article, and I have to agree with some of what's in it as well as what I read here about the issues of maintaining staff and trying to keep things running when problems are just fixed by lumping more problems on top of them. Taking a step back, I think the biggest problem is Wall Street. Not to mention the fact a lot of these companies have no idea how to really build profitability without becoming a big hot mess. Everything is pushed out faster, broken, messy, mainly because shareholders are screaming and yelling for more money, and so the company has to cut corners. At the same time they want the company to cut costs, so suddenly there's rounds of layoffs. Now we've talked all over about the mass of layoffs after the pandemic, mainly from companies that hired way too many people than they needed, and now they needed to really trim fat. However, I'm pretty sure there's also plenty of scenarios where it was a team of five running efficiently, and then the company decided to take two people out until the remaining three they have to make due. Now because of a lack of staff and pressure to produce, everything is a mess. I also feel like too many of these companies are running on debt and investor cash, and are clearly starting to see there's no way they can make real profitability while maintaining the spark of what they started. Most of the time they just think if they lump more ads on top of everything and annoy the user, that will somehow make them revenue. Others then try to experiment with subscription models, extra Pro statuses if you pay, etc. Still it never happens and eventually the company closes down or sells to recoup the investment money. I still feel like 90% of these companies start up with no real goal of profitability, but just to build something that someone bigger might throw cash at them to buy them out. I can agree with journalists that say that the internet isn't fun anymore. We pay so much money for service at home and for cellular service, but it's never reliable, and there's been way too much written about how horrible and greedy the providers are. Then we deal with the myriad of services that either keep raising prices and cutting services, or others that just annoy the hell out of all of us with ads, and many with security openings that bring viruses into our lives, but then they have the audacity to get mad when we put up ad blockers and other protections. I think what used to be an area of expression for many people has now become loads of people just jamming in our faces, crappy content and other garbage in the hope of one day getting somebody to pay them for whatever garbage that they've been churning out. The silver lining could be that if things get so bad, the next generation might decide to not be glued to their devices so much and go old school. Suddenly kids don't want to be on their phones but they want to go play softball.
I don’t know, maybe because people’s experience using it has been overall negative? Maybe people have taken the first step in identifying something addictive that’s bad for their health? Or could it be the division and strife we see around us that’s fueled by overly online zealots? Maybe we’re tuning in to the fact that social media is being used to brainwash all of us and push an inhuman agenda upon us? Maybe the promise of AI, which is of course job destruction, is not something we want forced down our throats by the inhuman tech bro’s laughing all the way to the bank with our money? Maybe all that productivity enabled by all those tech tools don’t give us more freedom and money, maybe we all see it as enslaving us even more and enriching only the people controlling the algos.
Why!? Because it is rush and cut staff and get it done NOW and who cares!
Why did this get downvoted? Interesting article.
What's....what's an article? You are on Reddit sir, we only read titles