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Its not just company greed, you can't get any engineers to agree to maintain a service in Keep the Lights on mode. Its not in their interest, let me explain. F
by jboy55 5y ago
Its not just company greed, you can't get any engineers to agree to maintain a service in Keep the Lights on mode. Its not in their interest, let me explain.
First, there's 0 chance at promotion doing maintenance work, so L4 (jr) engineers will bounce after a year or so as they have a clock running and have to move up or out. L5 engineers will stagnate and they will at risk for URA as they are supposed to keep improving. Frankly the work isn't L6 worthy, an L6 maintaining this as the only thing they are doing won't last a quarter.
So these services that just 'do the job' get bounced around
from team to team and perhaps when they get old and creaky enough, an L4 can promo themselves doing an upgrade/refactor. Until then, they just exist and are a bane to some team where they only produce off hour pages, even if a whole publisher segment depends on them to get paid.
- dogleash 5y ago>you can't get any engineers to agree to maintain a service in Keep the Lights on mode ...and then you go on to explain in business terms that only apply to the handful of companies that have cargo-culted similar dev team designs and incentives. I started writing a comment here about how my current employer structures and incentivizes maintenance but I've deleted it and decided not to give it away that info for free.
- jboy55 5y agoI don't think the culture I designed is a 'cargo-cult', but more of the result of a first order solution to designing engineer incentives. "We want to encourage engineers to get better over time, be entrepreneurial and feel in charge of their promotion" leads directly to "Maintenance work does not allow me to succeed".