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As engineer in a .NET/javascript/python shop, I can tell you that literally ALL your suggestions would freak the shit out of me. - k8 => why? I’ve never worked

by d--b 3y ago

As engineer in a .NET/javascript/python shop, I can tell you that literally ALL your suggestions would freak the shit out of me. - k8 => why? I’ve never worked with k8, but I’ve heard enough to know it’s an overengineered shit show that solves a problem I don’t have. Probably most people think like me. - iac template: don’t even know what that is. - shared wiki: and this would be the 14th repo that is meant to contain all doc, and that would be totally incomplete and out of date before anyone reads anything in it. And if you had written any docs, you’d know wiki is the worst thing to ask your eng to work with. You want docs, write it yourself! - scan repos for secrets, and make all access internal => how is that helping me exactly? - linting and security scans on all code => well imposing linting is certainly going to help me reach that deadline. You want clean code? Clean it yourself, cause I surely won’t clean garbage code from a guy who left 10 years ago! Security scans? Meh. - quarterly summary and survey: not my problem. Wait? Are you seriously asking me to fill in a painfully long form every quarter? Can’t wait for the “46% of you didn’t hand off your survey in time, you should do this over the weekend” email. - standardized app templates: AH, at last something for me. Is that helping in any way? Probably not, cause I already have a standard way of doing things, so this again is some top-down imposition on how to do things. Unless your standardize way comes with a ton of stuff that would be painful to do in my way of doing things, this is more stuff preventing me to do my job efficiently. —- The problem is that you should ask yourself: what can _I_ do to help those guys? What can _management_ do to help those guys? The best people I’ve worked with would take the pain points away. Like one of my boss would come in one morning and say: oh I’ve written the documentation for API x, and people would look at him and say “what? Thanks!”. Or one other came in and said “I hired some external database guy who’s going to go through all your sql queries and optimize them for you”. “Ask not what your team can do for you, ask what you can do for your team” is a bit cheesy, but it’s basically the job you’ve taken. And no dev exp is not devops. At all. You should really dive in the life of these people, take one-week rotations working very closely with all the various teams. See how they’d “onboard” you if you were a new employee. The first thing you want is a general overview of the place. But you should really change your attitude towards your team. Comments you’ve posted here kind of show that you think you know better than the 200 guys who’ve been here before you. Don’t be that guy. We’re all engineers. We’re all smart. Things are the way they are because things happened. Learn humility.

Atotalnoob 3y ago
I understand where you’re coming from “freaking out”. I didn’t want to write an overwhelming amount in the post. Perhaps that was a mistake. I won’t make new work for people they didn’t sign up for. That isn’t fair. I suggested a lot of changes and change can be scary. I’ve listened and already rotated through around 40% of development teams. There isn’t a wiki or centralized documentation management system, so it’s not the 14th place to contain all docs. The docs that do exist haven’t been updated in years and are hidden away in random locations. Myself and my team will be writing a lot of the docs ourselves. In fact wejust hired 2 technical writers. Scanning repos for secrets is needed because they have a LOT of secrets in their repos. That isn’t good, so I dug into it. The reason why they are there is because the average developer finds it “too difficult” to manage these in cloud. That’s a pain point that we are going to address BEFORE scanning and requiring the end developers to make changes. Linting isn’t going to be turned on and you now have 5000 items to fix. First off, we plan on making essentially automated codemods to fix most of the easy issues. Secondly, we are setting the target state in conjunction with the tech leads on all the teams. Manual fixing of linting issues is nuts when you are talking about millions of loc. The survey will be (max) 15 questions with multiple choice and 1-2 free text maximum. You don’t have to fill it out at all. I also will be hosting “office hours” and plan on being accessible as possible. I have to take some sort of measurement, otherwise how will I know how myself and my team are doing? No one is making you use our templates, but we have already measured better velocity. Everything is opt in and distributed using shared libraries. If you want to do things differently you can either not use my teams stuff, raise an issue and we will see if we can include it or open a PR with a change. Devops is part of devex, I guess we will have to disagree. If people are having trouble with their pipelines and that’s a development pain point, then that is directly in my wheelhouse. I’m not better than the 200 people that have come before me. I’m going to listen and adapt. I just wanted some outside feedback from other engineers. I don’t look at myself as dictating changes, but rather advocating for developers and delivering them QoL changes.
- d--b 3y ago
  Ok then it's just the way you presented things. If you want to take anything off people's plate, please do! If it's devops, I think people will be happy. Nobody wants to do devops. But engineers should not have to learn k8 because you chose to run things with k8. You choose k8, you take care of all aspects of k8. You might as well take all shared services: permissioning, configuration management systems, logging, monitoring, environment management, email sending, message queues.

by d--b 3y ago

Atotalnoob 3y ago

I understand where you’re coming from “freaking out”. I didn’t want to write an overwhelming amount in the post. Perhaps that was a mistake. I won’t make new work for people they didn’t sign up for. That isn’t fair. I suggested a lot of changes and change can be scary. I’ve listened and already rotated through around 40% of development teams. There isn’t a wiki or centralized documentation management system, so it’s not the 14th place to contain all docs. The docs that do exist haven’t been updated in years and are hidden away in random locations. Myself and my team will be writing a lot of the docs ourselves. In fact wejust hired 2 technical writers. Scanning repos for secrets is needed because they have a LOT of secrets in their repos. That isn’t good, so I dug into it. The reason why they are there is because the average developer finds it “too difficult” to manage these in cloud. That’s a pain point that we are going to address BEFORE scanning and requiring the end developers to make changes. Linting isn’t going to be turned on and you now have 5000 items to fix. First off, we plan on making essentially automated codemods to fix most of the easy issues. Secondly, we are setting the target state in conjunction with the tech leads on all the teams. Manual fixing of linting issues is nuts when you are talking about millions of loc. The survey will be (max) 15 questions with multiple choice and 1-2 free text maximum. You don’t have to fill it out at all. I also will be hosting “office hours” and plan on being accessible as possible. I have to take some sort of measurement, otherwise how will I know how myself and my team are doing? No one is making you use our templates, but we have already measured better velocity. Everything is opt in and distributed using shared libraries. If you want to do things differently you can either not use my teams stuff, raise an issue and we will see if we can include it or open a PR with a change. Devops is part of devex, I guess we will have to disagree. If people are having trouble with their pipelines and that’s a development pain point, then that is directly in my wheelhouse. I’m not better than the 200 people that have come before me. I’m going to listen and adapt. I just wanted some outside feedback from other engineers. I don’t look at myself as dictating changes, but rather advocating for developers and delivering them QoL changes.

d--b 3y ago
Ok then it's just the way you presented things. If you want to take anything off people's plate, please do! If it's devops, I think people will be happy. Nobody wants to do devops. But engineers should not have to learn k8 because you chose to run things with k8. You choose k8, you take care of all aspects of k8. You might as well take all shared services: permissioning, configuration management systems, logging, monitoring, environment management, email sending, message queues.