4 ms·

No idea how this made front-page. Sounds like the author met one crazy person and wrote an article about it. Totally irrelevant to me, I've never seen a compan

No idea how this made front-page. Sounds like the author met one crazy person and wrote an article about it. Totally irrelevant to me, I've never seen a company like this in practice in my long career.

mschuster91 8y ago
> Totally irrelevant to me, I've never seen a company like this in practice in my long career. Never worked in government, I assume...
- stareatgoats 8y ago
  Two private sector industry leader companies that I worked for had never heard of a staging environment before I joined, and the process to implement one was long and painful. The argument against it was: we wouldn't need a staging environment if we had competent developers ... Niche industry, so still not very big corporations, probably explains it.
GauntletWizard 8y ago
I've seen paragons of "Devops" with precisely this practice in significant chunks of the company. You've gotten lucky - or possibly just buried your head in the sand.
- 0xFACEFEED 8y ago
  Probably less to do with luck/head-in-sand and more to do with filtering out potential employers.
breakingcups 8y ago
I've seen plenty of companies function pretty much exactly as described. Just because it is irrelevant to you does not mean it's not interesting to others and thus front-page worthy.
choward 8y ago
> Sounds like the author met one crazy person He either met a straw man or a troll.
briffle 8y ago
The author, Tom Limoncelli, is seen as an expert in Systems Administration circles, and has written several books The most famous two: Time Management for System Administrators The Practice of System and Network Administration He also regularly gives talks at conferences, etc on the subject. He is most likely paraphrasing many conversations he has had with people over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Limoncelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Limoncelli
enjo 8y ago
If we're talking about "a company that only deploys rarely and requires many manual steps with many people involved to do it", then I've worked with a few. Typically they're shops that got very big very fast. They deal with problems of scale where schema changes are very expensive and data migrations can require weeks without heavy optimization. They typically have tried to automate some stuff, but the crush of feature work to support the massively expanding business always came first. They usually have CI, but never enough tests (unit, integration, or functional) to deploy with any real confidence. They used to deploy (by hand) every couple of days because it was easy. Then they just kept getting bigger and it became every week. Then maybe once a month. Typically they'll talk about why they don't do continuous delivery or deployment because deploys are RISKY and the business depends on deploys being perfect. I've seen this situation in video games (twice), a mobile app that had reached the 100 million user threshold, and an old school data marketing company. It definitely is a thing that exists.
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  What I would say, if I could rephrase, is this: Sure some shockingly-behind-the-times companies exist, and may even be a non-negligible percentage. But I'm surprised this is is front-page HN because I assume that the engineers on this website know that you don't need downtime for a DB migration. It feels very common-knowledge among this community.
acdha 8y ago
Have you considered that your experience is not universal? I voted it up because I've had surprisingly common conversations with people at large corporations, academic institutions, and the U.S. federal government where sclerotic processes made every deployment a tense, error-prone ordeal which people went to great lengths to avoid.
tracker1 8y ago
I've worked in several organizations where installations are as described in the not CI/CD fashion. It's not fun. Right now I'm working on a green project, and at least have CI/CD working, by once we start deploying our application to clients, it will get messy because we aren't following the practices set out in the article. It's been so bad, I've completely distanced myself as a developer because of those that have far more political influence as to the use of the database and the effects it has on me. I can work on the API, Database and other services. I simply don't, I was hired as a UI/UX/JS Expert. That said, it's not always the most pleasant way of separating the people working on an application, compared to full-stack development. I've been at this for over two decades, and tend to find it in lots of business development. Not so much in typical SV startups, but there's far more business development units out there than SV startups.

mschuster91 8y ago

> Totally irrelevant to me, I've never seen a company like this in practice in my long career. Never worked in government, I assume...

stareatgoats 8y ago
Two private sector industry leader companies that I worked for had never heard of a staging environment before I joined, and the process to implement one was long and painful. The argument against it was: we wouldn't need a staging environment if we had competent developers ... Niche industry, so still not very big corporations, probably explains it.

GauntletWizard 8y ago

I've seen paragons of "Devops" with precisely this practice in significant chunks of the company. You've gotten lucky - or possibly just buried your head in the sand.

0xFACEFEED 8y ago
Probably less to do with luck/head-in-sand and more to do with filtering out potential employers.

breakingcups 8y ago

I've seen plenty of companies function pretty much exactly as described. Just because it is irrelevant to you does not mean it's not interesting to others and thus front-page worthy.

choward 8y ago

> Sounds like the author met one crazy person He either met a straw man or a troll.

briffle 8y ago

The author, Tom Limoncelli, is seen as an expert in Systems Administration circles, and has written several books The most famous two: Time Management for System Administrators The Practice of System and Network Administration He also regularly gives talks at conferences, etc on the subject. He is most likely paraphrasing many conversations he has had with people over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Limoncelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Limoncelli

enjo 8y ago

If we're talking about "a company that only deploys rarely and requires many manual steps with many people involved to do it", then I've worked with a few. Typically they're shops that got very big very fast. They deal with problems of scale where schema changes are very expensive and data migrations can require weeks without heavy optimization. They typically have tried to automate some stuff, but the crush of feature work to support the massively expanding business always came first. They usually have CI, but never enough tests (unit, integration, or functional) to deploy with any real confidence. They used to deploy (by hand) every couple of days because it was easy. Then they just kept getting bigger and it became every week. Then maybe once a month. Typically they'll talk about why they don't do continuous delivery or deployment because deploys are RISKY and the business depends on deploys being perfect. I've seen this situation in video games (twice), a mobile app that had reached the 100 million user threshold, and an old school data marketing company. It definitely is a thing that exists.

alexandercrohde 8y ago
What I would say, if I could rephrase, is this: Sure some shockingly-behind-the-times companies exist, and may even be a non-negligible percentage. But I'm surprised this is is front-page HN because I assume that the engineers on this website know that you don't need downtime for a DB migration. It feels very common-knowledge among this community.

acdha 8y ago

Have you considered that your experience is not universal? I voted it up because I've had surprisingly common conversations with people at large corporations, academic institutions, and the U.S. federal government where sclerotic processes made every deployment a tense, error-prone ordeal which people went to great lengths to avoid.

tracker1 8y ago

I've worked in several organizations where installations are as described in the not CI/CD fashion. It's not fun. Right now I'm working on a green project, and at least have CI/CD working, by once we start deploying our application to clients, it will get messy because we aren't following the practices set out in the article. It's been so bad, I've completely distanced myself as a developer because of those that have far more political influence as to the use of the database and the effects it has on me. I can work on the API, Database and other services. I simply don't, I was hired as a UI/UX/JS Expert. That said, it's not always the most pleasant way of separating the people working on an application, compared to full-stack development. I've been at this for over two decades, and tend to find it in lots of business development. Not so much in typical SV startups, but there's far more business development units out there than SV startups.