7 ms·

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and t

• benjaminwootton 4y ago
  A lot of this sounds like big company stuff, perhaps in financial services? The issue with places like that is that risk is prioritised higher than delivery speed, which is arguably fair enough when there is a risk of large regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk. They are also set up to scale to thousands of engineers, so need consistency in technologies, reporting and ways of working. I didn't enjoy working in that environment, but I have more empathy nowadays for why they have to work in that way. Work for a smaller company or startup, and all of that stuff goes away.
  • michaelt 4y ago
    > The issue with places like that is that risk is prioritised higher than delivery speed, I don't think most organisations actually make such decisions knowingly. I don't believe the CEO ever says "This endpoint management system will remove 20 minutes of productivity per person per day, but it's worth it, let's deploy it" More likely the organisation salami-sliced away productivity 2 minutes at a time, the bosses have don't see the problem because they use macbooks, and the endpoint management team all love endpoint management so they ignore the problem.
• cloogshicer 4y ago
  Not all companies are like this. I know it sounds hard to believe. I had to look for a while but trust me, there are much, much better places out there. You just gotta find them. It's hard to judge in advance, and there's luck involved, but it's possible. Don't lose hope and don't settle for crap like this, get out while you can.
• ptero 4y ago
  This sounds soul crushing enough to me that I would look for a job elsewhere, even if it means taking a financial hit. Many places are not like this; I would look outside compliance departments, large financial and utility companies and established defense contractors for a more open setup.
• KronisLV 4y ago
  > At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and allow it. You know, this I never quite understood - why not provide example repos that follow all of the best practices? After all, the majority of the apps will be quite similar in their architectures and technologies (at least in some enterprises, e.g. "a Java shop" or something like that), so surely one can create some templates or snippets to work with.
  • easton 4y ago
    Speaking directly to the AWS case since that's what this is about, the whole point of permission boundaries is to prevent the blast radius of your IAM policy from being too wide. Coupled with service control policies ("thou shalt not" at an account level), I wonder why you'd need a manual review of your IAM policies. Unless it's a "we didn't know you could do that! time to stiffen up our policies" meeting, which seems weird. Having templates is useful though so you know what you need to define for your policies inside your boundaries.
  • AdrianB1 4y ago
    I am writing best practices for my department. Nobody else wants to do that, it does snot help the career and it eats up you own time from other projects that still need to be delivered. Managers don't care, they are not measured by that. I do it for my team and share with others, there is no other reason.
• boywitharupee 4y ago
  This was poetic.
• time0ut 4y ago
  This sounds so much like my company. Add in that management will make commitments to customers without having any idea what it will take to execute, schedule 20 hours of meetings per week, expect us to work a total of 60-80 hours a week to meet the arbitrary schedule, and also change priorities seemingly at random based on which customer is making the most noise. The best part is HR regularly talks about how we are a certified great place to work with amazing work life balance. I'd quit but equity...
  • 300bps 4y ago
    schedule 20 hours of meetings per week Have had this problem so much. The problem is managers and analysts are productive through meetings. Software Engineers are productive in blocks of 4-6 hours of focused concentration. Many managers don't realize this and forward FYI meeting invites to developers all day long.
    • domador 4y ago
      A relevant essay: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html (It's by Paul Graham, but I won't assume everyone on Hacker News has read it.)
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      Just ask if you should be focusing on anything other than your important project and if they could help with the communication around pushing the deadline out a day to attend this meeting. Or just skip it and say you are working on x or y.
  • janetacarr 4y ago
    > I'd quit but equity... From what I've seen, those golden handcuffs are usually gold-plated handcuffs with the same steel underneath.
    • ambivalents 4y ago
      Meaning, the eventual payout is rarely what you think it is?
• quacked 4y ago
  A lot of programmers don't realize that there's a difference between <building an application> and <ensuring that the actors that make up the global economy generate predictable returns on investments in order to grow stock-based compensation for shareholders>. All of the bizarre decisions by higher-ups--red tape, bad hiring, conflicting goals, ridiculous security policies--it all boils down to "what do we report on the financials, and how can we manipulate investors to continue to buy and hold"? It doesn't even matter what's actually profitable, just what's perceived as increasing real or potential share values by the actors in the market.
  • mech422 4y ago
    That seems to assume organizations are 'rational actors'... Which sadly is the minority of organizations I've worked for. The premise ignores the layers of people in-between the 'C' levels trying to get that return, and the engineers trying to build stuff. It seems lots of these people are mostly interested in politicking and justifying their position. (which I think accounts for some of the WFH resistance. If people can get stuff done with less supervision, it might lead to less managers :-P )
    • quacked 4y ago
      I've never met an organization staffed with rational actors that had more than like 8 people in it, so you're not wrong. I think what I'm getting is that ultimately every edict that flows downward into the layers of management and engineers is centered around increasing perceived profit for shareholders. Any department, project, etc. at large enough organizations was ultimately greenlit for the sake of possibly making more money (not for improving the product at a cost to the company or improving society, etc.)
      • mech422 4y ago
        >> I've never met an organization staffed with rational actors that had more than like 8 people in it, so you're not wrong. LOL - I like that, I'm stealing that line :-) I disagree with 'was ultimately greenlit...'. Seems like quite a lot of them are greenlit to improve someone's political position within the organization. (often, despite being told it will be a net negative for the organization as a whole) Things like 'use it or lose it' budgeting, compensation tied to headcount (and not value generated), etc. cause real conflicts of interest at many organizations. Anyway - thanks for the chuckle - I really love the 'rational actors' line :-) (hopefully, I'm one of the 8 ? :-D )
• anononaut 4y ago
  I agree and offer another perspective. My red tape comes from Google Play and App Store. Their restrictions, opaque manual review process, slowness, inability to quickly push updates, and cumbersome storefront backends have pushed my company to move away from native mobile development, which I love, to a web wrapped app, which I disdain. I distinctly remember thinking in 2014 there was no way the respective app stores were going to get worse. By far my worst professional prediction.
• ngc248 4y ago
  Also in this agile scrum world no one seems to care about technical feats or technical acumen. Its all about closing JIRA stories. Somehow Agile just grinds out all the fun out of coding making coding feel dreary and robotic.
• dom96 4y ago
  It makes me wonder whether companies should consider hiring more people dedicated to dealing with the red tape to unblock engineers. I suppose managers to a certain extent are the ones doing this work, but in many cases it's not enough, how about a new role that is dedicated to cutting the red tape?
  • acedTrex 4y ago
    This is what a squad lead is SUPPOSED to be doing
  • kneebonian 4y ago
    Their called PMs (with P being Project, or Product, or Planning or whaterver) They tend to be people who couldn't cut it as actual engineers, and so they end up in administrative roles, the ones that OP lambasted as writing stories to write stories, and causing more work, because they need things explained to them slowly and with crayons, and that takes more time, because the engineers just want to be left alone meanwhile the PM gets yelled at by customers, and decides to side with the customers and is just one more person yelling at the devs.
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      This is absolutely a mis-characterization of the average PM, in my experience. If the PMs in your organization act like this you've got bad PM management. The PMs I work with are professional cat-herders and bullshit-filters (both engineer bullshit and management bullshit). They keep projects pushing in the right direction, ask insightful questions to help remove blockers, and are overall a force multiplier.
    • jimbokun 4y ago
      I am extremely grateful for the product manager I work with most often. He saves me a lot of time by organizing communication with other people in the organization that I now don't have to.
    • di456 4y ago
      > They tend to be people who couldn't cut it as actual engineers I don't doubt your experience but it's also a harsh generalization. I've worked with many TPM's who were skilled engineers. It can be a path to transition to management and test the waters before taking on formal management responsibility. Or some people just think differently and are good at managing organizational complexity and finding the actual needs before starting to build things.
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  Programming isn't the only career that is having its soul crushed by red tape. My wife is a doctor and these days about half of her time is spent filling out forms and jumping through bureaucratic hoops instead of actually serving her patients. It is amazing how many nurses, admins, and others around her are constantly trying to figure out how to navigate the system to get any real work done. Every profession needs to have some processes in place to make things run smoothly, but when the processes themselves get in the way instead of helping; then the tail is wagging the dog. It is kind of like free TV shows. We always understood that commercials were necessary to pay the bills when we were not, but now many shows are completely unwatchable as 60% or more of the time spent in commercials.
  • anonymoose33282 4y ago
    I remember in 2017 I went to my GP in the US for a physical + bloodwork, and when I said what I was there for, the doctor recoiled a bit – because allegedly I had been booked for a 15 minute slot, rather than 30. And there was no way to do everything in 15 minutes. I had no idea such a thing even existed. Sure, there's a schedule to appointments and you can't just take all the doctor's time, but I had never ever heard of anything like that. As if at 15:01 into the examination, we'd both turn into pumpkins or something. Or the idea that really any health problem someone had could be observed, diagnosed, and treated in a quarter hour. Turns out that the hospital system she worked in had been aquired by nameless-faceless-health-conglomerate, and that's how they (and many other) hospitals worked now. Everything was KPIs, everything was maximizing people-in-and-out every day. When I asked the doctor how she felt about it she obviously tried to be as democratic as possible about voicing her displeasure at the new system. Annnnnnd about 6 months after that, she transferred to working at a senior living facility where she just gets to chat with elderly people all day, refill their prescriptions, and make sure they stay healthy.
  • Swizec 4y ago
    > about half of her time is spent filling out forms and jumping through bureaucratic hoops I was reading research on this recently because I’m working on an EHR software. The cited study concluded that physicians spend about 15% of their time face-to-face with patients and about 17% filling out documentation. For interns it’s worse with 11% time with patients and 22% writing things down. This was in Principles of Health Interoperability, a book from ~2016. On the bright side, all this documentation has been shown to literally save lives. Not sure it’s doing as much for us coders.
• scallaway 4y ago
  You've summed that up absolutely beautifully. The core fundamentals that make development enjoyable and sustainable are being ripped away from us, insidiously.
• hacb 4y ago
  Fun to read this comment, as I'm part of the team that deployed the exact same measure as for your wife: we now shutdown dev environments each day at 8PM. We decided to do so because over the weeks, we saw that a lot of devs "forgot" about their dev envs and they were up & running for 6+ months for absolutely nothing. On the other side, we are constantly requested to reduce infra costs, and dev environments (even unused) cost a lot. In the end, I'm glad we deployed this.
  • orev 4y ago
    Not only would they be forgotten about, but without forced downtime/reset, they start slipping into production use. The dev asks someone to “try it on my server”, then the word gets out about this other server that works better and has more features. Before you know it 2 years have gone by and this “dev” server is a critical system the business needs to function.
    • hacb 4y ago
      In our case, those dev envs are actually feature envs: they are a copy of staging with only the microservice they are working on that differs. So it is impossible for those env to end up as prod stuff for us. However, each FE is an almost exact copy of staging, and each dev has 1-2 running FE, so it requires a lot of compute and stopping them has a real impact
  • ericd 4y ago
    Couldn't this be done by giving the devs some transparency into how it's killing their team's budget and reminders, instead, so that they'd manage this themselves? Because this sounds super frustrating to deal with.
    • hacb 4y ago
      We kind of already have. We built a CLI that allows them to create/update/delete/list all their dev envs, so they have all the tooling needed. Also, we are still a small/medium sized company, so we often had the chance to talk with them to expose this issue, but in the end it never really worked.
• KerrAvon 4y ago
  There is no value in constant-surveillance antivirus software on a modern Mac — if your IT requires this, run far, far away
  • Sander_Marechal 4y ago
    For many companies it's just a checkbox towards compliance of some sort. You can argue and be right until you're blue in the face, but in the end it's the approval of, and certification by external auditors that matter.
  • twiddling 4y ago
    Have seen this where I am since we have grown from a small company to a medium sized one. Spyware, endpoint protection which crippled sudo, can't update tools that we have used for years.
  • Aaronstotle 4y ago
    As someone who works in IT, it is almost never up to IT what goes onto the Mac device. It's usually a compliance/legal ask, good luck explaining to a customer why you don't have anti-virus. Customer wants to see: Yes, Company X has Y anti-virus product on all devices.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      What customers demand antivirus software for office workers who provide a service to a company who provides a service said customers? You could say some certification requires it and customers demand that certification but that doesn't cover most cases.
• jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "All of this, to dabble in code" I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't understand or care about any kind of security or legal compliance regulations, don't optimise anything, don't want any constraints, any meetings, any plans, any accountability, just want to 'optimise developer productivity' where you play with the most fun framework of the day and millions of users suffer the consequences of it. "Developers" have only "developers" to blame for how software takes down a 1,000,000 IOPS SSD to the point of complete machine unresponsiveness. It's not 'Jira' or 'stories' or 'weaponised Agile' or 'Indian outsourcers' or 'management' doing that. Maybe instead of seeing it as red tape garrotting you or an abusive guardian at the front door with a shotgun, see it as end users with scowls their hired heavies at the door, end users wanting their computers back from your code, wanting their data back from your clutches, wanting their time back from your advertising, wanting their lives back from your industry's overreach. People who've had enough of the priority always being your comfort and convenience. People who've had to bring in the security heavies with their legal and compliance regulation to try and herd you because left to yourselves you leave SQL injection and plain text secrets and cross site scripting and logging libraries that can talk to the internet and execute arbitrary code and when told to get your act together, throw your toys out of the pram and want dynamic languages and moving fast and breaking things because anything else is too boring. Hobbyists can be dabblers, end users can be dabblers, people who get their job done in VBA and Excel or a Perl script copied from the web, or IFTTT, you aren't "here to help", you're here to laugh at them for using VBA and Windows and offer them a worthless meta-interpreter in LISP or a workflow from the 1970s. People are crying out for help and all they get from professional developers is scorn of business apps and CRUD software and yet another text editor and whining that it doesn't work on Linux. End users are not interested in whether Java has type erasure in its generics, or whether the BEAM VM is outdated or whether TypeScript is an improvement on JavaScript, they're interested in how to share a spreadsheet with a supplier in another company and why search never returns what they typed in, and why their phone can't respond to the 'answer call' button before the caller hangs up. As 'Uncle' Bob Martin said in a talk in some recent year, if the software development industry can't sort this out itself, if it can't fix the Boeing 747 Max and the cars on the road being exploitable over their cellular connections through the infotainment system to disable the brakes and cut the engine, if it can't fix the senator's private emails being leaked, or the shareholders being hit by a company taken out for a week by ransomware, it can expect governments to implement laws regulating software development, and those laws will be overreaching, uninformed, out of touch, hard work, no-fun, and mandatory.
• arvinsim 4y ago
  I was strongly against coding outside work. But now I spend some after hours coding just to keep the spark going. Main job is working in legacy code. It is fine most times but sometimes it is just soul crushing to work on such a restrictive paradigm.
• turdprincess 4y ago
  Could folks be optimizing for the wrong thing? I feel like there are plenty of 3 person startups where you can code your face off without red tape or human interaction. However, such gigs come with lower pay and worse work life balance. Personally, I made the choice to join big tech and collect a bigger check. The work can be slow and boring, but it's a conscious tradeoff I am making - money instead of fun.
• bmitc 4y ago
  I think this passes the buck a little. There are a lot of problems created by software engineers and software engineers alone. There are of course management problems, but that happens in every field. Software isn't special in that regard. My issue with software is that, in general, the software industry is both myopic, clinging to some bygone coding aesthetic of the 80s, and discontented, constantly creating new stuff or wanting to complicate stacks. Just look at the current status quo of source code management in Git. Management didn't make that decision. Software engineers did. Git is the most overly complicated software ever for its purpose, but it was software engineers who chose it as the standard and decided everyone needed to code as if they're on the Linux kernel team.
  • ElKrist 4y ago
    I'm curious about your opinion on Git. It's actually a tool I'm excited to teach to non-developer people who deal with text documents and the need to keep a history, multiple versions etc. I'm aware that now these features are integrated in some common offices apps so there's less of a need for Git there. However what's wrong about Git for code? How would you cover the same features differently? When I say "Git" I refer to all the ecosystem that's based on Git, including GUIs for those who don't like the command line
    • MrTortoise 4y ago
      its like using the army to watch over kids crossing the road to school Many other source control systems with far simpler systems this whole branch and pr into merge process didn't exist 10 years ago like it does now. It started from open source and low trust - but nobody stopped to ask what problem it solves. If somebody needs to check your code as part of a formal process - rather than some arbitrary invitation you issue in special cases - you shouldn't of been hired with the job of writing code.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      Source code control is important, but Git is not the only source code control system.
  • 4y ago
• Clubber 4y ago
  This sounds like it's the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Here's an example of what I mean: My kid takes the school bus to school. The bus is often late making my kid late. Mind you, my kid is at the bus stop an hour before school starts and school is only a 10 minute drive away. When this happens, my kid gets marked tardy and after 3, she gets a referral, even though it was the school that was responsible for her getting there on time. When she asked why, the response was, "it's policy."
• nextaccountic 4y ago
  > My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm What does remediated means in this context?