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Yeah. Resume-driven development. "Hey, we need k8s and/or huge AWS clusters because scalability" when often something simpler would suffice. At a previous posi

Yeah. Resume-driven development. "Hey, we need k8s and/or huge AWS clusters because scalability" when often something simpler would suffice. At a previous position our devops guy had provisioned a cluster of god knows how many AWS Redis instances. I pointed out this was a lot more than we needed. He swore up and down we needed them because scalability. He had no idea how much data was in those things. LESS THAN A MEGABYTE of data. In the whole cluster. We had no plans to grow it, either. And we were only accessing it a few times per day. We didn't even need Redis. We could have just stored it in the database directly. He didn't know any of that, and he didn't care. Because it didn't matter. Resume-driven development. He wasn't stupid. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. "Managed a Redis cluster" looks good on a resume. "Just used the database instead" does not.

quadrifoliate 4y ago
> He wasn't stupid. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. "Managed a Redis cluster" looks good on a resume. "Just used the database instead" does not. Did your company fire him and replace him with a DBA instead? If not, then the resume driven development is working! I hate it when people look down on resume-driven development while simultaneously also doing things that promote it by letting HR people unrelated to technology screen resumes for recruiting. Here's a hint -- if your company is screening, even subconsciously for buzzword (and believe me, most of them do) then you are enabling resume-driven development whether you like it or not.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Of course we were enabling it. Our CTO actually thought he was doing a good job.
  - Fanmade 4y ago
    You're almost exactyl describing what went down at my previous employer. The company already had a bunch of poorly written legacy systems which were used by about 50 clerks and written in PHP, Node.js and some .Net. They had problems with poor code and data quality, but none with performance. So they recruited a new CTO and a new Head of DevOps which planned the new infrastructure together. Of course now everything has to be split up in Microservices (or Nanoservices, because each one should basically have the least functionality possible) and thrown in the cloud. The only thing where a separate service actually makes sense are the machine learning processes that should extract information out of received documents. The rest could basically run in a basic PHP application on a Raspberry Pi without performance issues. When I quit that circus, development had basically stopped altogether and they were already paying five figure numbers each months just for hosting. I moved to a large corporation with the expectation that things should be better there. Turns out, that basically the same is happening on a larger scale. There they have a team of four guys having to manage more than a dozen microservices which were cut in strange ways. I am only a senior developer and no architect myself, but the ones I know are everywhere between crippling depressions and just laughing their asses of because of the stupidity that's going on in the tech world right now. There are companies where it's done properly, but either I have extremely bad luck in my surroundings, or those are an absolute minority.
morelisp 4y ago
Then these guys dance off from that to a company that actually needs to store tens of billions of k/v pairs, HA, and can make a big mess there before anyone figures out they're actually clueless beyond `sed s/replicas: 3/replicas: 69/ && docker-compose up`.
tester756 4y ago
>He wasn't stupid. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. "Managed a Redis cluster" looks good on a resume. "Just used the database instead" does not. Why not just lie that you did that? How employer would check that, lol.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  If the person interviewing you actually knows their stuff, it will be much tougher to lie your way through the interview. (I know... that's a big "if") So it is beneficial to have actual experience instead of just lying about it. Sometimes.
  - tester756 4y ago
    In this case if guy just adds redis instances where some apps just reads/writes a few entries, then he'll probably have harder time anyway if the interviewer knows their stuff

quadrifoliate 4y ago

> He wasn't stupid. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. "Managed a Redis cluster" looks good on a resume. "Just used the database instead" does not. Did your company fire him and replace him with a DBA instead? If not, then the resume driven development is working! I hate it when people look down on resume-driven development while simultaneously also doing things that promote it by letting HR people unrelated to technology screen resumes for recruiting. Here's a hint -- if your company is screening, even subconsciously for buzzword (and believe me, most of them do) then you are enabling resume-driven development whether you like it or not.

JohnBooty 4y ago
Of course we were enabling it. Our CTO actually thought he was doing a good job.
- Fanmade 4y ago
  You're almost exactyl describing what went down at my previous employer. The company already had a bunch of poorly written legacy systems which were used by about 50 clerks and written in PHP, Node.js and some .Net. They had problems with poor code and data quality, but none with performance. So they recruited a new CTO and a new Head of DevOps which planned the new infrastructure together. Of course now everything has to be split up in Microservices (or Nanoservices, because each one should basically have the least functionality possible) and thrown in the cloud. The only thing where a separate service actually makes sense are the machine learning processes that should extract information out of received documents. The rest could basically run in a basic PHP application on a Raspberry Pi without performance issues. When I quit that circus, development had basically stopped altogether and they were already paying five figure numbers each months just for hosting. I moved to a large corporation with the expectation that things should be better there. Turns out, that basically the same is happening on a larger scale. There they have a team of four guys having to manage more than a dozen microservices which were cut in strange ways. I am only a senior developer and no architect myself, but the ones I know are everywhere between crippling depressions and just laughing their asses of because of the stupidity that's going on in the tech world right now. There are companies where it's done properly, but either I have extremely bad luck in my surroundings, or those are an absolute minority.

morelisp 4y ago

Then these guys dance off from that to a company that actually needs to store tens of billions of k/v pairs, HA, and can make a big mess there before anyone figures out they're actually clueless beyond `sed s/replicas: 3/replicas: 69/ && docker-compose up`.

tester756 4y ago

>He wasn't stupid. He was very smart. He knew what he was doing. "Managed a Redis cluster" looks good on a resume. "Just used the database instead" does not. Why not just lie that you did that? How employer would check that, lol.

JohnBooty 4y ago
If the person interviewing you actually knows their stuff, it will be much tougher to lie your way through the interview. (I know... that's a big "if") So it is beneficial to have actual experience instead of just lying about it. Sometimes.
- tester756 4y ago
  In this case if guy just adds redis instances where some apps just reads/writes a few entries, then he'll probably have harder time anyway if the interviewer knows their stuff