3 ms·
Many commenters here are rightly pointing out Google’s hypocrisy in actually following the principles in this article. Fair enough. But others are throwing the
by zbentley 2y ago
Many commenters here are rightly pointing out Google’s hypocrisy in actually following the principles in this article. Fair enough. But others are throwing the baby out with the bathwater: it’s a little silly to read comment after comment saying that the advice in TFA must be bad because Google does dumb/bad stuff on the regular. Companies aren’t homogenous. Even misguided companies may employ people who can teach others important things.
Boeing is a perfect example of this. I would absolutely read an article proposing principles of engineering reliability from a Boeing eng/QA greybeard. Even as the rest of the company spiraled due to horrible leadership and management practices, many people in engineering and quality control did their damnedest to keep those failures from causing even more harm and loss of life. Those people probably have very valuable lessons to share about how to maintain what quality you can in a deeply hostile environment.
- dangus 2y agoI don’t see any validity to the alleged hypocrisy. End users making that criticism are confusing the products with the reliability practices.
- Tao3300 2y agoIndeed, allegations of hypocrisy are a class of ad hominem. They don't necessarily weigh in on the validity. It just... feels good? I guess? People LOVE to feel like they caught a hypocrite. It's probably in the Top 5 most sought after dopamine kicks.
- tbrownaw 2y ago>here's why doing <thing> is dumb >regularly does <thing> I think that might be a reason to suspect that the person doing that is hiding some holes in their argument.
- water-your-self 2y agoOn the contrary, they are likely very familiar with <thing> and their judgement comes from experience. Imagine a smoker telling you to never touch a cigarette
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoAlso Google has this problem after they outsourced a bunch of work to third world countries where original thinking is quite limited and management through bureaucracy is the norm.
- fl0ki 2y agoIt's only fair to say that SRE's attitude towards complexity can be very different to SWE's, reinforced by how their performance is reviewed. Though there's still hypocrisy in SRE complaining about how SWE builds projects while building equally contrived projects for other SRE to use.