closeparen

This has nothing to do with the "data broker system." Reading between the lines it was more of a "shadow IT" issue where employees were using some presumably third-party GIS service for a legitimate business purpose but without a proper authentication & authorization setup.

Sure, but the gap between your hourly wages has doubled.

That’s the Baumol effect. The rising tide does lift all boats to an extent, but not the same extent.

A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?

The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.

Having a few fault injection scenarios is baby steps. Next would be Jepsen-style testing, and most mature would be formal verification.

I think it is more of a social technology for keeping your ducks in a row. Developers won’t be able to gamble that something “never happens” if we induce it weekly.

Killing instances of load-balanced stateless services is not that interesting anymore in the context of a mature service mesh. What is interesting is injecting failures or latency on specific edges of the call graph to ensure that “fail open” dependencies really are. This is accomplished with context propagation, baggage, middleware, and L7 proxies rather than killing anything at the VM/container level. Even iptables rules turned out to not be a very good approach since most destinations would have many, constantly cycling IPs and ports.

In the stateful world, chaos testing is useful, but you really want to be treating every possible combination of failures at every possible application state, theoretically with something like TLA or experimentally with something like Antithesis. The scenarios that you can enumerate and configure manually are just scratching the surface.

Also true of human-written unit tests. You probably also want to have integration or UI automation tests that cover the end-user scenarios in your product requirements, and invariants that are checked against large numbers of examples either taken from production (sanitized of course), in a shadow environment, or generated if you absolutely must.

Please make remote development work well in the IntelliJ-based IDEs. It's very difficult to get corporate employers to continue supporting their toolchains locally when VSCode Remote is "good enough" and disposable cloud VMs are so much easier to support/secure/manage/scale.

The development experience in IntelliJ-family IDEs is incomparably superior, but you have got to figure out how to run the code indexing on the remote server and the UI locally. This quasi VNC thing isn't it.

Here's a really simple way to get a cycle.

Service A: publish a notification indicating that some new data is available.

Service B: consume these notifications and call back to service A with queries for the changed data and perhaps surrounding context.

What would you recommend when something like this is desired?

It’s too bad that there does not seem to be a comparable provider with datacenters in North America.

There's a saying in live audio: I mix for free. I get paid to haul equipment.

I code for free. I get paid to deal with JIRA, Zoom meetings, and the Bay Area.

Working from the office was of a completely different nature in 2019 when your coworkers were also there. By scattering headcount around the world, tech executives have fully committed to distributed teams that communicate by video call. The question now is whether you join video calls from home, or from a "hub" that hosts a minority (or perhaps none) of their other participants.

There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.

I doubt it. A company that is doing RTO is also a company that is aggressively offshoring and expecting you to spend your early mornings/late nights on IST friendly calls. It's just a general turn against US-based software engineers as belts tighten and the balance of power in the labor market shifts.

It's mystifying, but pretty much the entire tech leadership class has a deep conviction that taking Zoom calls on Airpods from your desk or a random corner of the office is the ideal way of working.

Americans have the right to marry and thereby grant status to foreigners.

You are demanding that their American spouse either divorce them or spend the rest of their life in another country. Of course it’s crazy and cruel.

Driving on public roads carries a responsibility to respond reasonably in all kinds of stressful situations. People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.

Okay, and? As long as crime is below its peak level, there’s no need to apprehend criminals?

Stealing cars (often at gunpoint) and driving them recklessly is an entertainment activity for young men with poor impulse control and little regard for human life. This kind of person makes decisions of comparable quality elsewhere in life that are probably incompatible with being middle class.

These are trivial matters in that the penalties are minor, not that they are optional.

International airports count.

You could simply ban targeted advertising, since that's what everyone is actually upset about, and not create insane collateral damage for non-adtech operators who happen to have network services and databases.

Modern internet company backends are very complex, even on a good day they're at the outer limits of their designers' and operators' understanding, & every day they're growing and changing (because of all the money and effort that's being spent on them!). It's often a short leap to a state that nobody thought of as a possibility or fully grasped the consequences of. It's not clear that it would be practical with any amount of money to test or rule out every such state in advance. Some exciting techniques are being developed in that area (Antithesis, formal verification, etc) but that stuff isn't standard of care for a working SWE yet. Unit tests and design reviews only get you so far.

> TCP/IP-based one-way

What would it mean to have one-way communication over TCP? Don't you need to send the acknowledgements back?

If you work in the Bay Area, want to raise kids in a house you own, and don't own one yet, then "can report to a Bay Area office" isn't going to work as your competitive advantage for much longer anyway.

I think people have been finding more compelling use cases for the fact that information systems can be multi-player now than for marginal FLOPS. Client-server is just a very effective way of organizing multi-player information systems.

I do not think it is righteous or enlightened when the American government flexes control over the tech sector. I can see how Europeans might have thought this about the EU when it was just GDPR, but subsequent developments have recast all of this as being about government control and keeping the tech industry “in its place” rather than a commitment to privacy and freedom in and of themselves. I think that ought to temper the righteousness.

The same EU that's doing Chat Control?

I disagree. The point of code review (and indeed, software engineering) is to get at the difference between code that works for its intended purpose (as far its author knows) and code that it's reasonable for us to be responsible for collectively and in perpetuity. That includes things like working in the way you would expect, minimizing surprise, using names that make sense, etc. which are fundamentally subjective and human factors. It's expected that a new team member bounces off some "not the way I'd have done it" type comments for a while until they're socialized into the way that the team or project does things and can reproduce it themselves the first time. Formatters, linters, and documentation can speed up this acculturation process but there is an irreducible degree of "good taste" which you just have to cultivate over time.

That said, it's also important the reviewer feels equally responsible for getting the work done and is willing to make pragmatic tradeoffs taking into account timeline pressure, how contained something is, how likely it is to actually cause trouble, how hard it is to change later. Cross-team and cross-org reviews are more likely to involve pure gatekeeping, which is death.