Of course we don’t - Jared is why some workplaces don’t suck. Having a dev with enough seniority to force management to do logical things is an incredible asset.
If you have the bandwidth… it is absolutely worth it to invest in a maintenance mode for your system, just check some flat file on disk for a flag before loading up a router or anything and then, if it’s engaged, just send back a static html file with ye olde “under construction” picture.
That’s not really… possible at this point. We have thousands of customers (some very large ones, like A——n and G—-e and Wal___t) with tens or hundreds of millions of users, and even at lowest traffic periods do 60k+ queries per second.
This is the same MySQL instance I wrote about a while ago that hit the 16TiB table size limit (due to ext4 file system limitations) and caused a massive outage; worst I’ve been involved in during my 26 year career.
Every day I am shocked at our scale, considering my company is only like 90 engineers.
Networking, we had a remote office in Europe (I’m in the US) and wanted to reset a phone. Phone was on port 10 of the Cisco switch, port 1 went to the firewall (not my design, already in place).
I work with IBM i/AS400 servers and those are not exactly the quickest thing to “reboot” (technically an IPL). Especially the old ones. I have access to the HMC/console but even this sometimes takes several minutes (if not dozens) just to show what’s going on.
It’s always a bit stressful to see the codes passing one after the other and then it stops on one and seems to get stuck there for a while before continuing the IPL process. Maybe it’s applying PTFs (updates) or something, and you just have to wait while even the console is blank.
I’ve been monitoring those servers for years and I’m still sometimes wondering if it hanged during the IPL or if it’s just doing its thing, because this part, even with codes, is not very verbose.
Fortunately it’s also very stable so it pretty much always comes back a few minutes after you start wondering why the hell it’s taking so long.
Of course Jared didn’t document anything and made themselves a bus factor. Real success is when Jared makes themself replaceable because hiding detail and making yourself critical is the best way to take a site down when you’re on holiday and prevent other team members stepping in and taking ownership.
Capitalism offers a perverse incentive in this regard. I have no motive to keep the company healthy, only to get paid. Ensuring I can be replaced benefits the company while harming me.
Then they should pay me based on that—giving me partial ownership, for example, would incentivize me to do better for the company. As it stands, I get paid the same no matter how the company is doing. I only have an incentive not to get fired… which is easier if I’m indispensable.
Beyond that, you missed my point. Even if I were being paid more, I still wouldn’t have any incentive to make myself dispensable. Unless I’m vested in the company profits, then the profits don’t matter to me.
Professional integrity. Have you ever worked for a company that got screwed by a consultancy? Vendor lock in and charging scandalous amounts for little offer.
You are paid for your skills and your time. If you’re confident in your ability and impact, you shouldn’t have to be worried.
I’m not saying sacrifice for yourself for your company, and if they are a shitty company that would replace you with cheaper, get out, but also, giving nothing for the pay you get is a bit dishonest, and then you are no better than them.
Plus, you make the case that hiring people is bad and paying a consultancy is less risky.
It’s not like the company has any integrity in their dealings, like when they lay off entire departments with no notice. One of my current coworkers worked for Dell for 17 years before being laid off. According to you, if she were confident in her abilities, she shouldn’t have worried.
Companies don’t care about integrity. They don’t care about people. All companies would replace you with someone cheaper if they could. Why should we care about them?
I wouldn’t recommend staying with a company for 17 years. That’s for sure. Best way to get stuck in a company specific niche skill that is not transferable. For the reasons stated you got to keep yourself positioned well skills wise and relevant so you can jump into any role you need at any time.
Integrity is not for the company. It’s doing things the way you think they should be done and earn your own respect.
I would say all companies don’t replace with cheaper. Many do. Especially the shitty ones. It’s quite easy to avoid those like the plague. Many did, and learnt the hard way, many have staff that have seen failed outsourcing and are in a position to influence that.
Soloing knowledge doesn’t keep you safe though as the penny pinching companies will remove anyway and clean up later regardless. It does not keep you safe. It’s a false sense of security. Complacency is a death sentence in software development.
When someone previously told a vrtx vm not to auto boot after power up and none of the remote access is working either… Both undocumented as well, of course. And your tired AF tech is statically configuring the wrong IP range on their laptop to manu because it’s been a long shutdown day and are also unfamiliar with the system in general (me). Good times, I figured it out though, but lots of sweating and swearing.
That’s why you connect an arduino to the motherboards reset pin and load it with a program where it resets the system if it doesn’t receive an ACK signal over the usb connection every 10 minutes.
Eventually though the networking and apache stops working after around 150 days so you also have to make a script that resets the system after 30 minutes of not having network.
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