This really doesn't narrow it down.
> and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism.
Still not helping.
I can only think of one social network when I hear that word. Are there others?
I suppose this way of referring to it is also meant to belittle it.
I assume the "the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism" part is more a dig than something to narrow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400687
https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...
I love how people are so willing to criticise companies that paid their salary but not their willingness to ignore the issues in the name of the fat paycheque.
This is clearly a reference to Meta, and in that sense the writing has been on the wall for years.
I wonder if the author feels or takes any responsibility in directly enabling that genocide and that fascism with their direct work.
But hey, a fat paycheque is a fat paycheque.
"That's supported" has no universal interpretation beyond physically describing a tabletop atop legs.
Absent a clear/consistent definition, people interpret "support" in the most favorable way possible from the seats in which they sit. Then, all around sadness ensues.
> 1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers
> 2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
> 3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
I'd say yes. It seems like an unforced error to them to broadcast publicly how bad things might be, but that's because they want software to be an efficient factory that turns computer cycles into money.
There's a tension between a theoretical Golden Path that leads someplace no-one actually wants to go, and simply paving every possible "desire line". Managing that is one of the trickiest parts of platform engineering.
Yes, the golden path is "fully supported" yet after a year or two the company executive swoop in and say "why are we spending so much money on the golden path" and slowly, but surely, the support for is whittled away into nothing until the golden path is out of date and actively punishing anyone that chose to use it.
For example, one of our golden paths was a UX framework built on top of standard web tech for the time. The team maintaining that framework is no more and it's now very far out of date. Adopting it means you are pulling in Angular circa 2016 and that you'll be dealing with incompatibilities between that and any new web component you want to start using.
For example I work for a Research University, mostly our software procurement is - while not always excellent - pretty good stuff. Maybe the supplier isn't as responsive as we'd like, maybe the software is buggier, maybe the documentation is worse, probably not all three.
However, the Government, responding to the usual anti-immigrant sentiment, decided it needs all Universities to check that people who are here on a restricted visa to get a degree attend classes.
The underlying sentiment is clearly racist, but OK in some cases you could imagine that's a real issue, a cheap course with foreign students who are registered but actually never attending because they're out delivering pizza or whatever. For a prestige research University though it doesn't make much sense - maybe you graduated top of your class in Taiwan, your parents pay an eyewatering sum so you can study here for an EE Masters to get that job back home with a team designing CPUs - then instead you skip classes to work as a taxi driver? No, absurd. But the government legally requires we solve this imaginary problem, and the only bidding supplier is garbage. So they're basically requiring us to procure garbage.
Because the supplier knows we're obligated, why should they support anything? Why care if it works, or is documented properly, or integrates with all the things they've told the government it can do? They know they're getting free money because of anti-immigrant sentiment, and they can take advantage of that until the winds change.
Their attendance tracking stuff could be useful. You can legitimately imagine having an early warning, OK, Sarah took a week for her mum's funeral, that's sad, but then she didn't attend any lectures at all for the next three weeks, we should have somebody go check Sarah is OK, or, well, she's clearly not OK, have them figure out what Sarah should do next. Take a year pause? Counselling on our dime? Right now, we aren't required to track Sarah unless she's on a restricted visa and the software is awful (for her, for us, for her teaching staff, everything) so we don't track her. So chances are nobody notices, especially if her class is big, and then in another month's time we find out Sarah was struggling after losing a parent, and we find that out because Police have to break her door open as she's been dead for long enough that neighbours noticed the smell.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155995...
One example of a source of tension that such standards were trying to deal with here was in a group trying to run web servers on machines with SSDs that were way too small: obviously for the bean counter saving a bunch of money on the SSDs was nice, but for the team trying to make sure the disk can fit all the code and logs on it, it was less nice.
Turns out human software engineers are really bad at fulfilling even well-specified requirements, so you will always save time by automating as much of the conformance testing as possible.
bravesoul2•8h ago
Like!