IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT

TJT

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TomServo said:
My stress level the last two weeks is off the charts. My team and our internal pentester defensive threat hunters have been working overtime on this AI shit MCP included.

Our prisma missed a dev deploying a llm with public access. Someone deployed deepseek locally. Etc
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I was just thinking about the issues in your realm.

Derrr I had the AI make terraform templates for me used it to deploy this application. Its propagated onto K8s and across our infrastructure now and it worked!

You fuckin wut?
 
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TomServo

TomServo

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TJT said:
I was just thinking about the issues in your realm.

Derrr I had the AI make terraform templates for me used it to deploy this application. Its propagated onto K8s and across our infrastructure now and it worked!

You fuckin wut?
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Not to far from truth. We gave our devs God tier control when private. Now public we are trying to reign in the k8 nightmare.

You have no idea how hard it is to bake security in so faggot devs don't whine and actually secure.

But leaves for decent job security.

Even on day off watching pool be built I'm on slack approving design docs and flows for a overly complicated cloud front reverse proxy
 
Tmac

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So, I'm having a hard time finding customer support/help desk software.

I have a team of 8 and we service about 60 customers. So, we're not big enough to need a full fledged system like Intercom, but we do need two things:
  1. A way for customers to submit tickets
  2. A way for us to track who has been taken care of
  3. Added bonus if there's some sort of chat bubble
  4. Double added bonus if there's a function that will store the page the user was on when they reached out for help
Everything I'm looking at has like 10 AI features and "routing" features and all sorts of shit we don't need. Any ideas?
 
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Rezz

Rezz

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Phazael said:
Developers can get away with this shit because there are a lot of useless meetings they can just ghost and tons of dead time because management cannot organize time for shit. And at the same time, companies are loath to let someone go who knows how the shit works, because letting a Dev fuck off and half time it (or a senior sysad) is cheaper than trying to bring a new one up to speed. Break Fix/Junior Sysads do not have that luxury, mostly because the moment a bean counter thinks they can get away with cutting you to cut costs they jump at it. Plus even during dead periods you have to be ready to respond to unexpected problems, so you can't just fuck off to another job.
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Oh absolutely. Like I said, I think it's dumb, and it's equally dumb on the other end where so much shit that could/should have been an email instead of a meeting that goes nowhere and then position expectations are based on a schedule swiss-cheesed with weekly checkins/etc... it honestly sounds like the employee should do it as much as they want, because they clearly aren't getting the proper leadership. And yeah, once you've been with a company long enough (and have all the keys to the kingdom so to speak) it's hard to even get a talking to let alone anything disciplinary. Especially at startups where getting in early means the wild west typically and all kinds of people have access/etc they probably shouldn't. And none of those people have documented exactly all the stuff they do so anyone coming in still has to have knowledge dumps that are mission critical. And even then when those start happening, engineers I know will always use language like "obviously we do it this way" and leave out the "why" part haha. Especially for super bespoke systems with roots going back a decade+. Maximum job security.
 
Rezz

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Phazael said:
Well once again the managers think they see a way to cut people to push up their stock and bonuses, heedless of the long term impact because if anything bad happens they just golden parachute to the next company to destroy. They have tried every angle to make the replace whitey with Poos thing work, from the initial gold rush of hiring Poos super cheap, to running with Poos under white guy boomer middle managers, to the current trend of mixing Poos and AI. At the end of the day, just like in real life, adding Poo to anything only ever makes things worse and metrics/customer satisfaction fall off a cliff. I expect the current new thing to go the same way, because they have not learned their lessons. Namely, if you want to adopt a new technology into your business model, you can't half ass it on the cheap.
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One of my previous companies basically did a 1:8 swap of US engs: Indian Engs. To say the learning curve was painful would be an understatement. We went from 99.999 to ~99 on uptime, which caused massive refunds and financial strife due to SLAs not being met. Mostly because they gutted QA and hired all Pune folk, who literally would just stop running tests on releases if they ran too long. Each release after the KD swap for like almost a solid year was an outage that lasted beyond our defined maintenance windows. Literally had the director of SRE along with a lead and both on-call folks for every deployment, because it was basically guaranteed that some (unbeknownst to us at the time... it came out afterwards) completely untested code was doing new and interesting things.

Out of the 200+ engineers they hired in Pune to replace the US engineers, probably 15-20 were actually reasonably good and not just super cheap error machines. I think the fund that bought them has pushed out the "go public/buyout" date two additional years each year since the acquisition. From three to something like "Before 2030" haha.
 
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TJT

TJT

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This is a problem with management though. They see the annual labor savings and that's it.
 
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Noodleface

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Work has been burning me out so bad I took a full sick day off yesterday just to not work and it felt amazing.

My team of 4 is down to 2 because 1 got poached and the other got brain surgery. We've been joking that our code almost killed him. Maybe that's in poor taste...
 
Neranja

Neranja

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TJT said:
This is a problem with management though. They see the annual labor savings and that's it.
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Money quote: "It's simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate."

From: The Era Of The Business Idiot
 
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Kirun

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It's always hilarious to me when people "in the trenches" think they have the WHOLE business figured out and if it just wasn't for those meddling middle/upper managers, work would be nirvana!

They often speak with an aura of superiority without ever having been in those positions and knowing what they actually entail.

For every person that thinks they are Einstein and the company's greatest gift (which, oddly, is basically EVERY "drone" out there), there are 500 shitbirds that have to be managed from taking excessive breaks, fucking around in the office, generally not being productive, and just stealing company time. But somehow, if these meddling managers were removed, all of that would go away, things would be bliss, and the company would run at 300% efficiency.
 
TJT

TJT

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Lots of management time is spent managing costs. At least at my company. We spend a lot of time understanding how to run cheaper and leaner.

Your perspective of policing people is one of the factory floor which just doesn't apply in the tech industry in general. If I tell you that you can cut your labor costs for the next 5 headcount by 80% what do you say? These hires may not be as productive as those you would pay market rate though.
 
Kirun

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TJT said:
Lots of management time is spent managing costs. At least at my company. We spend a lot of time understanding how to run cheaper and leaner.

Your perspective of policing people is one of the factory floor which just doesn't apply in the tech industry in general. If I tell you that you can cut your labor costs for the next 5 headcount by 80% what do you say? These hires may not be as productive as those you would pay market rate though.
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I fail to see how logistics don't apply across industries? You think that I'm not subject to budget concerns, labor costs, maintenance costs, etc.?

If I could get my labor costs down by 80% but their productivity/efficiency takes a hit? 100% I take that deal. In all my years of labor management I've never found a direct correlation between pay vs. productivity. Do you generally get better candidates the higher you pay? Sure. But I've had amazingly productive workers when we were hiring at $12/hr and I've had amazingly unproductive workers now that we're starting at $20/hr. I've seen rockstar managers come through at $60k/year and I've had dirtbags that want to take every possible advantage of "unlimited" PTO at $80k/year.

Pay vs. productivity are never directly related. So, I'd definitely take a "gamble" on a loss in productivity with the guarantee that I'm saving 80% on the cost.
 
TJT

TJT

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There is no level of policing for "excessive breaks" or anything like that in software development, legal, and so on. Your level of productivity is subject to many external factors far beyond your control. You cannot just move more X or create more Y in a quota like capacity.

If I finished every single task I have right now because I figured out some neat trick to be way more productive or leveraged AI agents better than anyone guess what I would be doing?

Sitting on my ass for the next 3 weeks until the rest of the org caught up. Playing ping pong in the office, dicking around doing nothing. Just like I did for months on end at General Motors. There are people paid $300k+ a year and barely do shit more than 2 or 3 times a year because they have specific skills in ancient tech that you simply cannot find on the market.

The only measure for performance is within the context of the tasks being given.
 
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TomServo

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TJT said:
There is no level of policing for "excessive breaks" or anything like that in software development, legal, and so on. Your level of productivity is subject to many external factors far beyond your control. You cannot just move more X or create more Y in a quota like capacity.

If I finished every single task I have right now because I figured out some neat trick to be way more productive or leveraged AI agents better than anyone guess what I would be doing?

Sitting on my ass for the next 3 weeks until the rest of the org caught up. Playing ping pong in the office, dicking around doing nothing. Just like I did for months on end at General Motors. There are people paid $300k+ a year and barely do shit more than 2 or 3 times a year because they have specific skills in ancient tech that you simply cannot find on the market.

The only measure for performance is within the context of the tasks being given.
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Correct. I have feasts and famine. most of it is setting aside time to be pulled in to fix emergencies of the junior architects. I never have the time to noodle around.
 
TJT

TJT

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If you take the guaranteed labor cost savings of the 80% discount Indian worker as a manager you get a good bullet point on your annual budget. Guaranteed.

But this also conceals later issues because many problems created by these idiots are only identified far down the road when they are actually ten times more expensive to fix. Hence why everyone complains about it. But never the managers.
 
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Neranja

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Kirun said:
Pay vs. productivity are never directly related. So, I'd definitely take a "gamble" on a loss in productivity with the guarantee that I'm saving 80% on the cost.
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This is complete bullshit in IT. What management people don't realize: You are not taking a "gamble" on a loss of productivity, you are taking one on the very existence of your organization.

Because it's not just loss of productivity in itself, in IT it can escalate to security incidents, or a total loss. One example: The french have a cloud (of course they do), and a data center caught fire in the battery room and the data centers next to it were also impacted:

1748034494992.png


And then you have people like this:

1748034540622.png


So, in the end I always like to question: How do you measure "productivity" in IT? For developers, do you measure VCS checkins or lines of code? Because if you do, you also have to realize that any metric you devise will be used to game the system.

You can read more about how "management theory" is bullshit here.
 
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TomServo

TomServo

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Neranja said:
Money quote: "It's simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate."

From: The Era Of The Business Idiot
Click to expand...
Dude shits on Friedman and sounds like a communist.
 
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Kirun

Kirun

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TJT said:
If you take the guaranteed labor cost savings of the 80% discount Indian worker as a manager you get a good bullet point on your annual budget. Guaranteed.

But this also conceals later issues because many problems created by these idiots are only identified far down the road when they are actually ten times more expensive to fix. Hence why everyone complains about it. But never the managers.
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And we all know the Giga Chad, 6'3 Einstein's on this board are definitely never fucking up and part of the problem at a workplace like 'ole Sanjay. I always forget how incredibly efficient, sexy, and intelligent this forum is.

If you have data on "major software issue causes X dollars worth of "damage"" compared to the labor costs of said company, I'd love to see it. I'll bet even millions of dollars worth of fuckups every X years still saves them more money than hiring Timmy the White Nerd who "knows his IRREPLACEABLE WORTH TO THE COMPANY!".
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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Kirun said:
And we all know the Giga Chad, 6'3 Einstein's on this board are definitely never fucking up and part of the problem at a workplace like 'ole Sanjay. I always forget how incredibly efficient, sexy, and intelligent this forum is.

If you have data on "major software issue causes X dollars worth of "damage"" compared to the labor costs of said company, I'd love to see it. I'll bet even millions of dollars worth of fuckups every X years still saves them more money than hiring Timmy the White Nerd who "knows his IRREPLACEABLE WORTH TO THE COMPANY!".
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You will never see that data because bigger organizations tend to dissipate responsibility and atomize guilt for fuckups, especially big ones, because it would make management look bad. And management is like East Asia in that regard, you can't lose face. Especially to the public.

However, I have witnessed multiple major fuckups. One of the bigger ones wasn't even software related, but off-the shelf hardware: buying a cheaper file server with unproven technology (which was bought by a major hardware vendor with billions from a startup) instead of the one we recommended for their quite complex heterogeneous setup. Ironically it was developed by Indians, and we also found it funny that the mkfs for their "secret sauce" filesystem contained ext3 code strings.

Long story short, it was a total disaster, and didn't work as advertised. One of the middle managers tallied the costs (IT costs babysitting this thing, and costs due to loss of work). It was a very ugly number with 7 figures, and it was more than the cost for the setup that was recommended to them. So instead of saving the company money, they actively lost more than they could ever hope to save.

-- timeskip --​

You'd think after a few years, when replacing such a system was in order, they would've learned a valuable lesson from all of this, right? No. They doubled down, and I quote: "Because we have to allow vendor to make it right."

So they brought in the newer replacement system, and it was even more of a shitshow than the last one. The vendor gracefully exited when they saw what a fuckup it was going to be (again), and said "engineering said you can't have this feature". A feature that had been in the required specifications since the very beginning of the first system. So in the end it was not the company that pulled the plug, but the vendor.

In the end, they had to go with the system we recommended. And that system never went down, not even a single time in the 4 years we had it. It was replaced by a bigger system from the same vendor, which also never went down once.
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Kirun said:
And we all know the Giga Chad, 6'3 Einstein's on this board are definitely never fucking up and part of the problem at a workplace like 'ole Sanjay. I always forget how incredibly efficient, sexy, and intelligent this forum is.

If you have data on "major software issue causes X dollars worth of "damage"" compared to the labor costs of said company, I'd love to see it. I'll bet even millions of dollars worth of fuckups every X years still saves them more money than hiring Timmy the White Nerd who "knows his IRREPLACEABLE WORTH TO THE COMPANY!"
Click to expand...

Bro I fuck up all the time and I am replaceable. By your reckoning 100% of IT should be offshored due to the guaranteed cost savings.

I mentioned before that it can take a year for a new dev to understand the company infrastructure and proprietary technology. This is with full on the job training support. These things can simply get very very complex.

Now add in Indians who totally lie on resumes and are shit at communication what do you think happens? You have a cheaper hire that lacks the foundational skills to even learn what you're trying to teach him in any reasonable time frame.

But you sure did save some money this quarter.
 
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