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Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true. The two that stand out are
by kayo_20211030 10mo ago
Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true.
The two that stand out are
> Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead.
and
> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.
as a warning against about being too, too clever.
- pcurve 10mo agoAgreed. Not just engineers, but basically everyone involved in creating products including designers and PMs. Every single bullet point here is gold.
- gdulli 10mo agoThere's rarely a bullet point advantage that some new language or tech stack can offer me that would outweigh ten years of observation of how a familiar setup behaves in production, such that the space of unknown unknowns is reduced to almost nothing.
- simonw 10mo agoMy personal rule is that the new technology stack item needs to either make is possible for me to build something that I couldn't have built without it, or needs to provide a productivity boost significant enough to overcome the productivity lost by straying from the more familiar path - even harder for team projects where multiple people need to learn the new component.
- kayo_20211030 10mo agoYeah. I'm in agreement there. I guess that it's an application of The Law of Least Surprise for a future developer (who might actually be me, which it often is)
- imiric 10mo agoEh, sure. But at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with "14 years at Google" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does. This type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable. This is evident from the author's "bio" page: written in 3rd person, full of aggrandizing claims of their accomplishments, and photos with famous people they've met. I'm conditioned to tune out most of what these characters have to say. If this is the type of people who excel in Big Tech, it must be an insufferable place to be.
- doublerabbit 10mo agoMood. As someone who normally leaves after two years because the opportunity never raises to what was offered in the job spec these really don't for for me these bullet points as well wouldn't work for office culture in the EU. 15 Years worth of jobs and none gel. I'm a contractor now which feels more me. I have a contract length, don't have to deal with red tape political bullshit. Turn up, do work and leave when contract had ended.
- willi59549879 10mo agoIf you can easily acquire new projects and are happy with what you do, that can be very nice. I would probably fail at selling myself
- doublerabbit 10mo agoI've never needed to sell myself. $corp will advertise needing a contractor and you apply as usual. If you have the skills and experience you tend to get hired. The only difference is you don't get job security, pension or any perks. But you do get a lump sum though. Where you can then decide what's best.
- gosub100 10mo agoAnd google wasn't founded by people who just kept their heads down and employed the simplest, most direct solution to the problem. If they had done that, google search would have been done on a super-fast server or mainframe using an RDBMS.
- morshu9001 10mo agoGoogle still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies.
- moffkalast 10mo agoHave they ever had an outage in recent years though? Pinging 8.8.8.8 is the gold standard of making sure there's internet in my book.
- morshu9001 10mo agoGCP has had some multi-region outages