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What if I told you all of society is held together by duct tape? If you're surprised that startups cut corners you're in for a rude awakening. I'm frequently am
by gizmo 10y ago
What if I told you all of society is held together by duct tape? If you're surprised that startups cut corners you're in for a rude awakening. I'm frequently amazed anything works at all.
- cnst 10y agoStartups only, you say? Everything, everywhere, is held together by ducttape!
- saosebastiao 10y agoTrue. I watched a 60 year old manufacturing plant shut down for 7 days once because someone saved an excel spreadsheet in the wrong format and it deleted a macro written more than a decade prior that held together all of their operations planning.
- kirushik 10y agoAt my current project we have components which are literally called `duct-tape` and `glue`.
- overcast 10y agoThere's a big difference between holding together things with duct tape, and literally taking zero backups of it.
- ChristianBundy 10y agoI'm not sure that there is.
- hardwaresofton 10y agoThe real question is what holds together duct tape?
- StringEpsilon 10y agoReminds me of this: > Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks And if you think that paragraphs does not apply to your applications / company, ask yourself if that's really true. My company sends around incident statistics and there's always some shit that broke. Always.
- SZJX 10y agoI don't think a lot of things work at all. We who live in developed countries are the minority really. Most things are simply non-functional and downright ugly. Such complex systems the world has. And now apparently even the developed worlds are in for some troubles. The peace and progress in the last few decades just really isn't the norm in human history. That said, one can't deny that there are indeed things that do work, and work very well, and people who make that happen, and one can always be amazed/inspired by those. There are good things as well as haphazard things. It's just that the latter generally outnumber the former in many settings. It doesn't necessarily imply a sweeping statement about everything though.