I read The Cuckoo's Egg only a few years ago (in my 30s) and it's an absolute delight. Easy to understand if you do any sort of linux administration, and really demonstrates how lax things were and how far we've come in terms of cyber security.
Yep. I've found that the ticket or tech debt isn't important until it becomes on fire and must be fixed ASAP. It doesn't matter that the possibility for the bug to happen has existed for 2 years, the organization doesn't find the investment worth it until it's burning down the house.
Having dealt with all of these in production, I can tell you the strategies I've used to combat these things:
1. Solid code reviews. Anyone of our developers can halt a code review for any reason. We require 3 approvers on each review. Sensitive areas require reviews from people familiar in that area. We also have tooling that allows us to generate amounts of test data in dev that is similar to prod loads. This helps us catch a lot of time bombs.
2. Feature toggles to decouple deploy of code from release of code. This allows us to test our code in production before turning it on for customers. It also allows us to slowly rollout a feature and watch how the code behaves. This also gives us a kill switch to turn off the code if it is bad.
3. An incredibly robust testing pipeline. It takes about 50 minutes from commit to production deployment. We can also deploy previous containers very quickly for situations that require it.
This doesn't solve all of our problems. Some changes cannot go behind feature toggles (DB migrations, dependency upgrades, etc). But we do pay a lot of attention to design and rollout plans for database migration changes and such.
All of these things come at an extra cost to us, but it allows us to move quickly when we need to. But we're in a lot better place than we were when we were trying to do weekly releases. We have a good mix of team experience (sr vs jr) - and have a lot of discipline in our software engineering practices. We still have problems like I said, but these strategies have greatly improved our ability to deliver software.
> I've worked at a lot of places like this, and I'm continually surprised people enjoy it.
That's been my experience as well. When a manager says they try to "shield you from the bullshit" it's just a lack of transparency that leads me to making my own (often worse) assumptions.
I once read an account of someone that took Ibuprofen on an empty stomach and burned a hole in their stomach lining. Since then I always eat something first.
> You have to really provide valuable, quality content for organic SEO
This is the key. Google wants to make sure your readers are getting their questions answered. SEO is constantly changing, but high quality and valuable content will always be king.
So what's the big picture here? We've suspected for years that football leads to brain trauma. Does that mean the NFL should shut down? Should they continue to operate as normal?
There have been efforts recently to make the game safer for players, but the amount of concussions and injuries seen every season don't seem to be decreasing.
Can you make the game "more safe" without drastically changing the game? Any game played at this high of a speed, with this strong of players is going to have some inherent danger to it.
Do we just need to make the effects more widely known and understood by the players, maybe treat football like smoking with warnings printed on the outside of helmets? Anything less than that and you run the risk of not making your point.
Should I feel bad as a fan for watching football? Is it any worse than buying clothing made by child labor from a third world country?
It sounds like he's doing quality work, really. There's no secret. He claims to have a GREAT copy writer for his niche and provides them with the exact info they are looking at google for. Do that for a few hundred well written articles and any site will rank well too.
But a google algorithm change could definitely crush his income.
I think we're starting to see that across the entire industry. Leadership is easy when times are good. The job has gotten very hard.