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With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an eq
by nitwit005 10mo ago
With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines.
There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
- mrsilencedogood 10mo ago"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running." Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
- natebc 10mo agoTheir ops teams are probably ground into dust.
- JohnMakin 10mo agoFor real - this made me laugh, because I had the immediate exact thought. Oh boy
- esseph 10mo agoTrying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.
- esseph 10mo ago(sorry, replied to wrong comment!)
- websiteapi 10mo agoDidn’t twitter get 3/4 people laid off? Seems to still work as of time of writing (x.com).
- lawlessone 10mo agoMore bots than ever, bots can be interesting , but outside the political intrigue behind their commissioning these bots are not very interesting. And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.
- paxys 10mo agoLooking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.
- websiteapi 10mo agoThe claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?
- johannes1234321 10mo agoThey cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running) Also initially they had a lot of breakage.
- websiteapi 10mo agoIndeed when you have fewer people you generally reduce scope
- lesuorac 10mo agoAlso they made an entire separate company X.ai to do Grok and some other stuff which certainly involved hiring people.
- fwip 10mo agoThey don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important. If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
- EliRivers 10mo agoI've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working. I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
- smileson2 10mo agoyeah, the work I'm proudest of are the projects I've been able to walk away from that still function
- Workaccount2 10mo agoPeople dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company. That collapse didn't happen.
- heavyset_go 10mo agoTwitter went from being the heartbeat of the internet to X, the second Facebook for your parents to repost catturd2 posts and Pepe memes on.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Xss3 10mo agoLosing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge. Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract. Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoEvery on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.
- CodingJeebus 10mo agoIt only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact. Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
- strifey 10mo agoStaring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running. PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
- nitwit005 10mo agoIf your work place has a long enough history, try comparing incidents on work days versus weekends or holidays. Typically the incident rate is dramatically lower when no one is making changes.
- strifey 10mo agoTotally true, but we host other people's code (PaaS, etc). We don't get to dictate their working hours. It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
- mempko 10mo agoYou do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.