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Early in my career one of the IT guys told me that one of the people on staff was "a technical magpie". I looked at him with a raised eyebrow and he said "He ha
by zer00eyz 3y ago
Early in my career one of the IT guys told me that one of the people on staff was "a technical magpie". I looked at him with a raised eyebrow and he said "He has to grab every shiny piece of tech that shows up and add it to the pile".
This is where we are.
I can't tell you how many times I have seen projects get done just to pad a PM or developers resume. Just because it was the lastest and greatest hot shit thing to use. No sense of if it would be better, faster, cheaper, useful.
When cloud was the hot new thing the company that I worked with launched a replatform on AWS. It gave us the ability to get through the initial scaling and sizing with ease. We left right away, because even then the costs did not make sense. Now we see folks crying about "exit fees" that were always there. That assumes that your institution even has the gall to own years of pissing away money.
Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI understand that's your opinion, but could you show me some badly designed user research results to make this conversation more data driven?
- blueflow 3y ago> more data driven Any other engineering discipline. What are common practices in IT would be negligence in other disciplines and might get your permit/license removed. IT is the only sector where companies like Cisco or SAP can exist despite the horrible reliability of their products.
- Hasu 3y ago> IT is the only sector where companies like Cisco or SAP can exist despite the horrible reliability of their products Come on, other industries have garbage companies putting out garbage products, too.
- palata 3y ago> Come on, other industries have garbage companies putting out garbage products, too. That's correct, but we have to admit that the software industry excels at this.
- marcosdumay 3y agoSoftware is full of monopolies. But monopolies' products are garbage in every industry.
- robertlagrant 3y agoCan you explain it in a different way? I have no idea how it relates to my comment.
- JAlexoid 3y agoAs one of my friends, an SAP consultant, said - "The value of SAP isn't that it's actually good, but it's predictably scalable" As in - you can setup a process in Germany, then replicate it globally with predictable accuracy. And predictability matters a lot in stable low margin businesses. Walmart can't spend a few billion on a project that may have -100% to 400% return value, when. they have the option of having a reliable 20%-30% return value.
- blueflow 3y agoProvided the transition to SAP doesn't bankrupt you.
- fHr 3y agoIt is realy funny how SAP is the one single big software company from Europe and it is an absolute dumpster fire.
- FromOmelas 3y agoLIDL famously burned around 500M € on a SAP rollout before pulling the plug.
- zmgsabst 3y agoWhen has a decision that’s bad for the decision maker ever been popular? We see it in the C-suite; we see it with engineers. I think the travesty of so-called “principal engineers” and “engineering leaders” is their adamant refusal to make doing the Right Thing (TM) sexy. Your employees are monkeys: act like it.
- thimp 3y agoYep. Microservices! AWS! Everything Gartner and Thoughtworks says! It'll look good on my resume... ..several years later.. Escalating cloud costs, high staffing cost, staff turnover, heavily reduced margins, decreased productivity, burnout, clients unsatisfied, C-suite paving over this by hiring more marketers...
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI wonder how many early stage businesses went tits up because they drank the microservice kool-aid and burned valuable engineering cycles that should have been spent on features on docker spaghetti.
- dullcrisp 3y agoAlternatively how many later stage business failed because all their features were in a Rails monolith that no number of engineers could maintain.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoThat guy was just optimizing for future employability, albeit in a short sighted way. Being able to talk in an interview about how you have professional experience with various tech stacks is valuable. That being said, optimizing for that at the cost of current job performance and coworker alienation is just dumb, since job performance and networking leads are more important for landing good jobs. I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at.
- zer00eyz 3y ago> I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at. The magpie was practically furniture (Over a decade there). We speculated that he had buried a literal body for the CEO based on what he got away with. Shiny objects was an astute call on the part of IT guy (he was setting up another new MacBook for him)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOn the other hand, at least someone was exploring new tech. In the exploration/exploitation problem, going 100% exploitation and only ever using the same boring old tech for everything is not the optimal choice either.
- berkes 3y agoOne reason why people hire me, is for my actual, production, experience in loads of stacks and architectures. Actual, production experience, is, IMO, a requirement to make decisions. No-one will make a good decision to ditch or embrace, say, microservices, based on a HN conversation and a few blog-posts. Nor will they make such a decision based on papers in science journals. But rather based on failures with monoliths, failures with microservices, successes in Rails, successes in Drupal, and failures in Rails or Drupal. (Or leptos, React, flask, whatnots). Actual felt pain, and drawn learnings. Actual celebrated successes and drawn learnings. edit: I'll often bring that up in consultancy. "Yes, Rails is great because X and Y. But Z is a rather real danger for your case; we've been bitten by that when building FooBarLy..." What I'm trying to say: yes, indeed, this person is also collecting experience and evidence to make future decisions on. That there's a real need, and actual benefit on trying and implementing new tech. If only because otherwise we'd still be maintaining COBOL mainframe spagetti (oh. wait...)
- nunez 3y agoto be fair, when you don't have any pathways for working on $COOL_TECH at your job, designing and justifying something overly complex makes sense
- bluGill 3y agoJust be careful not to go too far in the opposite direction. There are new things coming all the time. You probably don't want to be writing new COBOL anymore even though it was once a good idea (you might have to maintain it, but you should already know what you replace it with and what your interoperability strategy is)
- yowlingcat 3y agoIsn't there a labor shortage for COBOL engineers to maintain the mainframe code that powers $3T of transaction volume in banking and healthcare enabling skilled COBOL contractors to name their price?
- marcosdumay 3y agoOnly at the salaries those banks want to pay, that aren't high.
- bluGill 3y agoDepends on the bank and what the code is. I know of insurance jobs that pay very nice salaries. 9-5 job where if you are around at 5:01 they tell you to go home. Vacations are mandatory as well (all banks have mandatory vacations - they need you gone long enough that if you are embezzling money whatever scheme you had breaks and someone else figures it out investigating what is wrong). It is however boring coding that will suck your soul so many around me accept less pay for more interesting work.
- rwmj 3y agoCOBOL itself is pretty horrible, but if there's an old tech which I'm happy using and there's still high demand for it, why not?
- bluGill 3y agoUsing it is fine, but you need to know it is horrible and you should already have a this is what new stuff is done in plan in place. Or at least try to make that plan, there may not be a better alternative yet, but you should be looking.
- phendrenad2 3y agoIt's the job of engineering management to stop this. We're supposed to say "why do you need this? Justify the need for this". I.E. "Why do you need kafka here? Will we have enough traffic volume to warrant it? Make a proposal." And they need to follow up and ask "Was that needed? Show how we're using it". But engineering management is so busy filling out TPS reports they don't have time to actually do any oversight.
- free_bip 3y agoThat would require that engineering management actually be competent technically. A shockingly large number aren't.
- rqtwteye 3y agoI have rarely seen engineering management that's of any help making these decisions. Either they resist any change or they jump on technology because they have read a LinkedIn article or Gartner report. I have never seen good, fact based technical decisions come from there.
- convolvatron 3y agoengineering management is equally likely to assert some kind of baseless 'best practices' position without really understanding whether or not its actually a good idea in this context
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. So, not fun, not rewarding, no intellectual challenge, no career benefit. Why exactly should I want to do it? This isn't the goddamn United Federation of Planets, nor is the company a church - why exactly should I go above and beyond what I agreed to in exchange for my salary? It's not like the bosses go above and beyond either, nor do they believe in company "mission". To be clear: I understand the importance of actually doing your job right, and benefits of using boring tech, but you are not selling that well here. Employees need food and shelter and creature comforts, and so do their families. They are going to think beyond the current job, because if they won't, nobody else will.
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoThe problem is when you prioritize your future career over playing your position and achieving results for your current company. It ends up hurting both the company and your own future prospects because this mindset will inevitably get outed by an engineering manager who isn’t easily bamboozled by shiny objects.
- codingdave 3y agoBecause your work is then stable. Easy to maintain, not getting paged for customer problems. Which leaves you the time to do more work that will be interesting and beneficial.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoNo it doesn't. If your work is easy, the scale gets ratcheted up until it's nearly impossible. That's why web devs have so much trouble with the seemingly-simple task of parsing and producing text
- dartos 3y agoWhat scale? How does easy work affect scale?
- olav 3y agoAs a product manager, I am frequently confronted by UX people who declare something as „standard“, a feature that is supposed to be an absolute „must-have“, or else our organisation would loose even the last of our users. Unfortunately, developers tend to accept these things as interesting challenges and (knowingly or not) underestimate the effort and complexity needed to implement it. My very lonesome role in these cases is to insist that this shiny thing is no standard at all and that our users would be quite happy without it.
- internet101010 3y agoI see this with a lot of people that do visualizations and dashboards. A lot of fancy stuff going on but most people just want simple tables with filters that apply to other views (mostly rollups) when navigating. The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics is an essential reading for anyone who regularly presents data.
- cmsefton 3y agoI'm immediately reminded of my favourite Kurt Vonnegut quote: "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." I've always felt that the magpie syndrome you describe is because of the desire to build new things, rather than maintain what's there. I watched a repair show recently where a craftsman repaired an old 70s bedside clock. The pride, time and patience he took in repairing the clock was wonderful to see, actively avoiding rebuilding parts if he could reuse what was there, even if there was a crack or blemish. I've always respected engineers that maintained and fixed software well, and also knew when to reach for the right tool in the toolbox. Better yet, those that knew when not to build something new. Perhaps that's something you learn through experience and doing, but I wonder if it's actively taught, encouraged, or rewarded in the workplace. It really should help get you your next job.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIs it a flaw though? There's a lot of truth in that eCard: "a clean apartment is a sign of wasted life". How much of technological progress occured to ease the maintenance burden? Is it a flaw that the washing machine is saving people ridiculous amount of time (to the point of, arguably, allowing two-income households to exist in the first place)?
- greenie_beans 3y agoi'm glad i have "kurt vonnegut" notifications because this was nice to read.
- duped 3y agoOne of the best jobs I ever had was under "technical magpie." Did we get shit done? No. Did I get paid a lot of money and always have new stuff to do instead of shoveling CRUD? Absolutely. It was a blast.
- JAlexoid 3y agoYes, it's basically being in college - while being paid. If your resume is full of those kind of roles, I'd disregard your resume and many experienced managers will as well. Remember that your resume will not hold much value, when you give off "we built this thing with friends in a garage" in your resume and little else. Have you supported anything in production? No? Explain why should you be a candidate for anything other than an entry level position as a SwE.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago> If your resume is full of those kind of roles, I'd disregard your resume and many experienced managers will as well. That's why you lie about it.
- chasd00 3y ago"lie" is a strong word but my resume is always optimized for the role i'm applying for. If I have experience in a technology that's not relevant then i leave it off and use the space/attention for something better matching the role.
- al_borland 3y agoI had a job like this for a while. My boss always wanted to be involved in the new stuff and I was the one he threw it at to kick the tires. Some stuff got done, but nothing too mission critical that kept me up at night and it was pretty relaxed.
- fatnoah 3y ago> When cloud was the hot new thing the company that I worked with launched a replatform on AWS. It gave us the ability to get through the initial scaling and sizing with ease. We left right away, because even then the costs did not make sense. Cases like this always fascinate me. I've led a "move from Data Center to AWS" effort twice, and both times it was at > 50% cost savings. However, I think both were probably small infra footprints compared to many cases like many others.
- dakiol 3y agoDon’t we get paid the big bucks precisely because we have to fix stuff like this? I mean, if maintaining and fixing software were easy, I guess we wouldn’t be earning 6 figures. In software engineering We have all these principles and patterns and whatnot precisely because we have to deal with a pile of things that don’t work well together.
- fwip 3y agoI think our outsized compensation is less because it's hard, and more because of our industry. In tech companies, labor is a relatively small expenditure, so tripling your labor budget to get 5% more "output" can be a very rational thing to do. (Also, the Mythical Man Month means that a smaller, sharper team is often more useful to solve your task than a bigger one.)
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoIt's a common behavior. When I started my last job as the software lead at a small company, I was warned that one of the senior engineers on my team was easily distracted by shiny things. They were not wrong. The dude was smart and effective, but I had to spend way too much time keeping him on task.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago> I have seen projects get done just to pad a PM or developers resume This reminds me of the time that I complained that a sensor on the machine we were developing was way too complicated and that there were far simpler ways to accomplish the same thing. Someone with more history on the project explained. The engineer who designed that sensor expected, and received, a patent for his work. The company was quite generous with patent royalties and no one's getting a patent for an off the shelf float switch!
- tamiral 3y agodeal with a bunch of this right now, no considerations for future growth of system and also dump everything in json and itll be ok ....tech debt in architectural designs is real... and it takes a lot to trim it back and say ok now we are moving to XYZ tool that works and doesnt need to be shiny. Had a chat with a client once and they needed something and i said this looks like itll be a report and they wanted some super duper dashboard but all you needed was a small db + csv extract for charts etc.
- mhh__ 3y agoI'd argue it's something a little more fundamental than mere CV padding Taking the CV aspect literally — this is a sleight of hand because it's a metaphor — I know lots of people who do this stuff that don't have a CV at all. There's levels to it of course, but I don't really view it be any different to people who insist on using old machines as a bit (but in the other way obviously)
- smugglerFlynn 3y agoIt’s not the tech, it’s the business - people pay for new and shiny things to be added, regardless of the actual value they bring. Engineering managers hire for shiny things on your resume precisely because of that business trend. Tech trend will continue until this business mindset of burning money on shiny things changes.
- phendrenad2 3y agoI wonder if this effect ultimately advantages Google, and other companies that create their own internal tools rather than using the new shiny buzzword.
- mlhpdx 3y ago> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. When you see opportunities to do such work in a way that delivers something new and valuable, I recommend taking hold of them. I learned this somewhere along the line, but not until I’d missed a few from self-doubt and indulging the inner magpie. Clear, simple and value focused engineering is _exactly_ what I’m looking for in candidates these days. Focus on the long term, not the short term — just like with investing.