When did on-call become so accepted and demanded from employers?
Currently I am "Release Captain" for a week: So I have to setup any releases and manage all the related tasks, do automated/manual testing of the release, release (enabling toggles and any config changes).
Then Backup to secondary and primary for a week: About once or twice I am asked to help with tickets.
Then for 14 days we alternate primary / secondary.
Thursday to Thursday is our deal. Every ~40 days I am in one of the above.
It's absolutely miserable.
I have never had this much time spent doing non-development related tasks. For 4 weeks every 1.5 months I can't have a life at all.
This just screams to me that we are forcing broken software/not complete software out the gate a building huge piles of technical debt that will never get the focus.
I remember a time when I would start at 9am and end at 6pm every day and never heard a peep about production issues unless the support engineers couldn't figure it out. Which maybe happened twice a year.
To make matters worse most things are not allowed to be touched in production with the risk of being fired for making changes. So if you want to "fix" any data or call xyz service you need high ranking approval. It's like being tortured!
Perhaps it's time they consider lidar? Elon hasn't seen the WHY yet?
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated that cameras are the only sensors self-driving vehicles need, and that Tesla's electric vehicles do not use lidars. Musk has previously called lidar "expensive appendices" and "a fools' errand". He has also said that any company that relies on lidar for its autonomous capabilities is "doomed".
If you're traveling near Dayton Ohio or near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base ever I HIGHLY recommend visiting the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
They have a XB-70 on display and it's amazing how large the plane is! There's also a pretty good documentary on it from Discovery's "Great Planes" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2158498/) if you want to nerd out.
>Wow, you very accurately explained my life, except i'm on call even more than that.
I'm sorry, it has to be one of my least favorite things about this career. Nothing worse than getting calls off-hours when it's only you. Feeling marooned is never a good thing. I am currently hoping my phone doesn't buzz today! Hope it's quiet for your sake!!! I don't deal in anything lifesaving or absolutely critical, but it sure does feel like it while you're on call.
>And I think somehow you understated the security patching.
Oh yes I do. 8+ critical CVEs on one microservice, you upgrade the libraries/dependencies with the CVEs just to find the new version has 2 other CVEs. Worse yet, you upgrade the dependency and it breaks other functionality (generally from internal dependencies that haven't been upgraded since they were created, LOL). To make matters worse, all of this is inherited and often we had nothing to do with the initial development. I get it, they need to be fixed so there aren't other bigger problems, but it's death by 1000 paper cuts.
>What drives me crazy is I'm always behind, and when my manager asks me to do something, I'm always having to argue for higher priority things that are beyond obvious.
I just wish they would give focus/time to preventing on-call/customer issues so we could all be more rested/fresh/prepared to handle all the changes in priority! Make things so we don't have to spend large amounts of time fixing them. Actually evaluate failure scenarios and address them. Being extremely intentional with our time as a team. I am currently dealing with EOY reviews and displaying my value so I don't have to potentially move for RTO (I despise being in an office and was so incredibly happy to find remote work). 6 years of working remote and suddenly it's a problem from leadership?! I struggle to find the energy to argue lately. Again, it's not even software development related! Weird times.
Let's see...
14 days on call every 3 months.
3 releases a week.
All the normal review work. PRs, design, etc.
SCRUM meetings.
Meetings before the meetings.
Crazy deadlines which were arbitrarily given by someone in another group.
Being up late to make changes because the business deems it too risky to do it during regular business hours.
Endless performance testing, e2e testing which always generates defects that arent really defects but still need 30m of my time.
Upgrade this or that to the latest. version because xyz no longer supports what you have.
Endless security vulnerabilities that need to be upgraded.
Pipelines that need to be upgraded or fixed just to get a release.
Failing tests which need to be investigated.
Hundreds of configuration points which control process flows.
Never ending lower environment problems.
RTO.
Constant fear of being laid off.
Definitely no way anyone could be burnt out.
I actually want to work on my own projects during the weekends if I can. That somehow brings me happiness compared to what I work on at work, which is bogged down by external issues.
My personal projects I have no one to report status updates to, no one to tell me "I'm doing it wrong" no customers to support, freedom to mess up. Lol
I have been since the first people at my previous employer told me it would replace all the programmers.
Then I found out the developers assigned to working on the low/no code parts had a component where they could write Java inside their low code process. There were hundreds of lines of code in each business process in the low code parts. They were writing giant methods in their process wired up by the true low/no code part.
To make matters worse the tool did not support unit testing of the custom code.
It ended up being like dozer mapping entity to entity and then passed along to custom code. All wrapped in some crummy UI. It produced a jar file which would be deployed anyways.
Maybe the tools are better now. We had some Tibco product at the time.
The more I mess with SBCs the more I lean towards this method.
The M720q's or M710q's are two of my favorites.
As an added bonus the chargers even work with my lenovo laptop(s).
Having owned many raspberry pis, a handful of rock pis (4A, 4B, Zero and S), Mango Pis, Khadas VIM4 and other SBCs (I have a problem haha)... I can say without a doubt the two shining stars the Raspberry Pi has are their distro/software and general ecosystem.
Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis.
There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me.
I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!
Damn, I was hoping the old PoE hats would continue to work with this one.
Looks like the PoE pins have moved around. Another 20+ USD on top of the board cost...
Kinda disappointing, but the upgraded SD speeds will be nice.
Was also hoping they'd boost the core count or memory for some models, I know it's kinda against their targeted group, but would have been nice to have the options
This is amateur hour!
Let me know when you own all the flavors of the MX Keys, Mechanical, Mini, "Regular". All of the microsoft designer keys, a few Vortex keyboards (Core 40%, Cyph3r), some Dvorak keyboards, apple ones, custom made ones..... lol
It really is an addiction, it's a shame I too keep coming back to the MX Keys Line (Currently in love with the Mechanical w/ Cherry switches).
I wonder what the FBI has for running on linux/unix? I'm sure the FBI budget allows the means to create a botnet for any OS, but the easiest thing to do (maybe) would be to stop using windows..?
I haven't been able to find them for cheaper than say ~$120 USD. I purchased two "GMKtec Mini PC Windows 11 Pro Intel 11th Gen N5105" on amazon for $115 each after a coupon. These are the 8GB Memory and 128GB SSD version. I'm okay with that price for an x86 CPU (even though it doesn't support AVX). There are a few other brands you can find out there with either a N5095 or N5105 (Alibaba even had 16GB memory versions).
Why is it that the opinion of a "digital" Reporter and Management Professor are peddled as absolute truths?
I'm sure they are very intelligent people, but every time someone who hasn't spent any time writing software tells me what they think this or that will do I have to take it with a grain of salt.
There is so much more to software development than just spitting out code.
I feel like the same people crying wolf about AI/ChatGPT are the same ones who would push the idea of lines of code a day = productivity.
I'm sure it will displace some people in tech, no doubt. But maintaining code, coming up with requirements, devops/ci/cd, testing, support, etc are still a very necessary thing whether or not some silly service generated your code for you or not.
I remember when I graduated college my first employer was eager to use a low/no-code tool to produce applications. Everyone there claimed it was the future of "programming" and software development. Drag and drop coding would make it so the business analysts could "write code". How did that turn out?
I am skeptical of those who claim "IT'S OVER!!!" when they do not seem to understand the whole picture of writing software.
I'll probably eat crow in 10 years, but for now I will just continue on enjoying "coding". When the day comes that AI replaces my job, I'll learn something else. Writing software has done nothing but helped my ability to learn something quickly.
Honestly,
look on ebay for used Lenovo ThinkCentre M/P "Tiny" or Dell Optiplex "Tiny" computers. They can be purchased by the lot for most of them as businesses get rid of the old ones.
I use 4 Lenovo M910x's as a kubernetes cluster and home lab. Have them all connected with a netgear switch. The whole setup costs about the same as a single new quality work station.
Each has:
i7 8700 (6c - 12t),
32gb memory,
1TB SSDs,
<1L case,
they're practically silent.
easy to find parts, they even use lenovo laptop chargers. if one dies, I can easily purchase + replace in a few days.
You can even go cheaper if you don't need the absolute fastest cpus. Some of these older tiny computers can be purchased for around 100 bucks if you look for them. It has worked like a charm for me. Not sure how much horsepower you really need, but this is a cheap way to build a home cluster. I think they hover around using 40w most the time, so power isn't really too big of a cost either.
I commented above, whether the salary is 150k, 250k, 500k... the impact doesn't change 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.33%. Not sure it really matters. Again I'm not defending lazy employees or saying employers are bad for doing this. I feel there is a hidden cost of layoffs from my own experience of being at a company doing round after round of layoffs.
Understand 2x, I was also looking across all the jobs at spotify. There are some that go as low as 70k salary, a majority seem to be 170k+. It was just for ease of calculation. even if we take 500k that's still 0.033% of revenue -_-
This is my main point from personal experience. I worked at a company that had almost yearly layoffs (caused by a late transition to the online world and competition). I knew whole teams that were reduced to a single person. Now that person has to do support 24x7, new feature requests, general information requests etc. Thank god I did not have to deal with that. Also it's very difficult to hire when people know the company is/has been doing layoffs.
I have never had this much time spent doing non-development related tasks. For 4 weeks every 1.5 months I can't have a life at all. This just screams to me that we are forcing broken software/not complete software out the gate a building huge piles of technical debt that will never get the focus. I remember a time when I would start at 9am and end at 6pm every day and never heard a peep about production issues unless the support engineers couldn't figure it out. Which maybe happened twice a year. To make matters worse most things are not allowed to be touched in production with the risk of being fired for making changes. So if you want to "fix" any data or call xyz service you need high ranking approval. It's like being tortured!