I debated for a little while where to put this, the previous blog post by this author was posted in ~comp titled "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again". Other blog post of the...
I debated for a little while where to put this, the previous blog post by this author was posted in~comp titled "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again".
The common theme here is that they are brutally and refreshingly honest about a lot of aspects of the current landscape of working in IT/tech. Which made these posts explode in popularity, resulting in another one named "My Glorious Ascension To Thought Leadership". So maybe ~tech would have been a better overall choice.
However, the post I submitted today basically follows up on all of this and what it all means in regard to their carreer. The realization that some of what they write is not always found in their own actions and what steps they will be taking moving forwards. Which I feel like might make it a good fit in ~life?
I've always found his mindset to be a little odd. He talks about intentionally drinking the bad tea at work because he wants to be reminded of how bad it is. He intentionally keeps mentions of...
I've always found his mindset to be a little odd. He talks about intentionally drinking the bad tea at work because he wants to be reminded of how bad it is. He intentionally keeps mentions of cloud tools off his resume, and wonders why he isn't getting matched with competent employers. He has strong opinions on the right way to do technical work, which probably blind him to other considerations, and he seems to focus on the bad.
I get that a lot of companies suck. That's partly why I choose to work in the nonprofit and education space. But I did consulting for years to supplement my salary, since nonprofits aren't knowing for paying well. I've seen plenty of good and bad, applied for lots of jobs, been recruited, etc.
But like, how can I take someones advice or perspective on the industry too seriously if they don't seem to know how an applicant tracking systems automatically scores resumes, and knows how to state their experience to actually get interviewed by top employers?
So I wish him well on his business. He's chosen a hard way to learn all these noon technical lessons that he should have tried to learn before starting a business. But maybe he beats the odds and makes it.
You are right that they often put a spotlight on the bad. I don't think it is a bad thing, in fact I think it is rather refreshing in a space where often negativity does not seem to be really...
You are right that they often put a spotlight on the bad. I don't think it is a bad thing, in fact I think it is rather refreshing in a space where often negativity does not seem to be really allowed.
Having said that, you are free to your opinion, of course. Two things did stand out to me though.
mentions of cloud tools off his resume, and wonders why he isn't getting matched with competent employers.
How do cloud tools correlate with a competent employer in your mind? I am asking because, I can see the reasoning for not wanting to be employed by companies where specific cloud tooling is valued or valued enough to land you an interview. If a company has a heavy focus on specific cloud tools and less so on other technical aspects, it can be a clear indicator of how they value technical expertise and skill overall. As a lot of cloud skills require you to learn to work with them, not understand the technology itself.
Of course, this is just a generalization, but that is the context we are talking about this anyway.
if they don't seem to know how an applicant tracking systems automatically scores resumes, and knows how to state their experience to actually get interviewed by top employers?
I am fairly sure they are aware of this. At the same time they are also aware of the fact that for a large part of the actual job openings it is more important to have the right network and not a resume that is designed with the latest recruitment SEO in mind.
Though, I am honestly not sure how that one aspect invalidates their perspective based on actually working in an industry?
It's not any one thing, but several things together that give me an odd vibe. So, a network is great, but most companies do have a process to follow. The network gets you a foot in the door and...
It's not any one thing, but several things together that give me an odd vibe.
So, a network is great, but most companies do have a process to follow. The network gets you a foot in the door and maybe the first interview and a good word, but unless it's the CEO you are friends with, your materials do need to stand up to rigor. Additionally, recruiters don't work off of vibes. They do look at your resume and match you to openings that line up, enriched with any first hand knowledge of you that they have.
So all that being said, recruiters often use tools that score resumes to job postings, and so do hiring departments. If your resume doesn't include the sort of table stakes materials, like cloud familiarity often is, then your resume won't score well against that posting and you won't get matched. And if you aren't matching against postings from companies that have their act together and are including good postings with the table stakes references they want, then you end up matching with the B or C tier.
Which gets us back to the tea and him choosing to stop bringing in his own to intentionally drink the bad tea, because it reminds him he's not valued. Maybe?
It creates an impression for me that he is making things harder on himself than it really needs to be, and that might distort his impressions. Maybe he does know how the industry actually vets talent, and chooses to not go along on purpose, which is effectively self sabotage, like the tea. But why? Why do that?
Much of the complaints he has really aren't unique to IT, but are generally symptoms of poor management, which hit accounting and finance and HR the same as IT. Solving those issues by running an IT consulting business won't work. He might enjoy it more, and he might be able to work with better organizations. But you help fix problems with general managers by consulting with our becoming a general manager.
So I wish him well, I really do. But the few posts of his I've read remind me of former colleagues who tended to make life harder for themselves by not looking at non-technical issues in the industry.
In my mind, if someone is a developer who doesn’t claim to have any knowledge of the cloud, it comes across as claiming to not have any knowledge of the cloud, which in turn speaks to a large gap...
In my mind, if someone is a developer who doesn’t claim to have any knowledge of the cloud, it comes across as claiming to not have any knowledge of the cloud, which in turn speaks to a large gap in knowledge about something very basic. If it were true, I would expect it to be correlated with a serious lack of general competence. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to be purposefully omitting it.
Just out of curiosity, what does "the cloud" mean to you? Because when it all comes down to it dealing with a cloud platform like AWS and GCP there actually isn't all that much cloud specific that...
Just out of curiosity, what does "the cloud" mean to you? Because when it all comes down to it dealing with a cloud platform like AWS and GCP there actually isn't all that much cloud specific that also can't be found in "old fashioned" datacenters some companies host their things on. A postgress database is a postgress database hosted in your own datacenter or through GCP. The management interfact might be slightly different but a lot of the issues the same.
Of course, a kubernetes environment in GCP works slightly differently as one hosted in your own datacenter. But you can still use the same tooling to work with it.
What I am getting at is that "cloud knowledge" or "cloud experience" aren't all that meaningful. Any competent technical engineer who has worked with the underlying technologies will be able to quickly integrate in an environment where things are hosted in a cloud environment.
So, it only really is a red flag for people who do not realize that the technical skills and mindsets aren't all that different. I can tell you from experience, before last year I technically had very limited "cloud" experience as all the companies I worked at before maintained their own data centers.
I then moved to my current company, where they use GCP. The cloud aspect of it is has never been an issue. The issues we run into are very much the same technical challenges I would also run into with previous companies.
The point I am getting at is that people shouldn't be hired for their cloud knowledge. They should be hired for their technical knowledge first and foremost as that is what cloud knowledge is anyway.
I'm not @unkz, and I sort of agree that cloud can be "somebody else's server" but not completely. If all a company is doing in the cloud is running VMs, they aren't clouding very well. Or at least...
I'm not @unkz, and I sort of agree that cloud can be "somebody else's server" but not completely.
If all a company is doing in the cloud is running VMs, they aren't clouding very well. Or at least they are doing it in the most expensive way possible. Cloud infrastructure as a service is a big Swiss army knife that I expect an expert level IC and certainly a lead to have used. Knowing what services are out there, what works better in the cloud vs on-site, what better allows activity based costing, what avoids local bottlenecks, etc, is all part of what I expect from a technology expert. I say this as a former director of engineering who led all IT engineering teams, cloud, networking, I AM, etc.
So if I'm interviewing someone and all they can tell me about cloud is it's just the same as running a postgres server, but elsewhere, I'd have the same reaction as someone saying Git is really much the same as subversion so I haven't bothered.
The segmentation, automation, and hybrid blending of services is pretty powerful, and the cloud allows for all of that.
I did not say the cloud is just running vms... Neither am I saying that hosting postgress is the same as using it in the cloud. However, from a technical perspective, when working in either...
I did not say the cloud is just running vms... Neither am I saying that hosting postgress is the same as using it in the cloud.
However, from a technical perspective, when working in either environment, there really as not that big of a difference as you make it out to be. At least not for people who work as part of teams and work with the technologies.
Unless you are thinking that all companies who have their own datacenters do everything still on pure bare metal. Then I'd understand your argument, but that is simply also not the case.
CI/CD pipelines are pipelines everywhere, a relational database is still a relational database with the same queries, code in whatever language is still code in that language no matter the platform, GCP PubSub is just another messaging middleware like Kafka (I'd say PubSuB is technically easier), Kubernetes is still Kubernetes and I could go on and on. Again, for someone with a strong technical background in a modern tech stack "the cloud" isn't all that new even if they technically haven't worked in it.
That's not to say there are no differences, but that is also true when switching companies where they use a different infrastructure, different core libraries, etc. Those are things anyone competent will pick up in short order when onboarding.
Which I know from experience and have seen others do.
In fact, I am even willing to go as far as to say, that someone with a strong technical background will have an easier time switching to a cloud environment than a lot of people who just learned a specific cloud environment will have switching to a different one (say switching from Azure to GCP).
To bring it all back. When we need to add someone to the team, the first thing we look at with is the familiarities with the technologies we use. Familiarity with our environment (GCP) is a plus, but only if all the other prerequisites have been checked.
In fact, from what I know from friends at other companies, they do the same thing. Then again, the friends I am thinking of are working in productive teams and somewhat functional companies, so no surprise there.
After typing this, I also realized that we might be talking from a different perspective. It seems you are focussed on ICs and Lead roles. Where I am talking more broadly about hiring people as part of teams.
With ICs I can understand you wanting to make sure they have deep knowledge of the specific area. Although also there I would argue that for an IC it is more important to showcase that they are able to quickly learn new technologies. Dive into the deep end and figure out if a technology is right for the company.
As far as leads go, sure, there the platform becomes a bit more important. But leads have such responsibilities that they are already a macro level higher compared to most engineers working within teams. They do need to have more insights in costs, etc.
But both roles are a small fraction of the all the people who work in IT and go through the hiring process. And for the majority of people I do strongly believe in what I have written so far.
I agree that when I interview I look primarily for fit, aptitude, and past successes, because specific technical skills can be taught or learned. That said, I disagree about the lack of all cloud...
I agree that when I interview I look primarily for fit, aptitude, and past successes, because specific technical skills can be taught or learned.
That said, I disagree about the lack of all cloud knowledge being not a big deal in this day and age, especially if your organization uses cloud.
The biggest thing is simply knowing what's possible so you know what to explore when a need arise. Is the person aware that serverless databases exist? What are the use cases for a serverless database? If we take on a new customer that requires a HIPAA baa, and we find we need to have an off-site replication X miles from our data center, is the person aware that the cloud has options, and how to start looking them up?
Again, I'm not talking about an entry level position, and I'm not asking them to be able to deploy a VPC and ECS cluster in AWS from the CLI. I'm talking about a technical senior level position and basic knowledge of what's available in the cloud. I expect them to have at least some cloud knowledge because it shows that they are curious, and that they can contribute to brainstorming, even if they aren't part of the implementation for specific cloud environments. Do they know what regions are? General concept of tagging? Pros and cons of serverless? How you extend on on premise network to your cloud environment?
I'll also say I expect software developers, or at least web developers, to be able to use and understand ping and trace route to trouble shoot why their site is down. So maybe I'm just picky, or burnt out explaining ping to uninterested developers who want to submit net out reports when the network is obviously fine.
But on that note of being picky: I always paid folks well, and provided a good work life balance, hybrid work, cooked lunches for my teams on Fridays, approved remote work for extended travel, etc. So to the point of the post, and my earlier point, maybe the best places to work are choosey like me.
As a fun aside, I'll end with a horror story of otherwise competent senior level devs on an enterprise team going down in flames when left to their own devices in the cloud.
I ran the main cloud practice in AWS for a large org. A team of about 10 developers and integrations folks said they wanted to use Azure because of the specific developer tools. I said that I didn't have staff to devote to Azure right now, and their AVP did an end run and they went and got their own Azure environment. They stood up hosted SQL servers, code integrations, native data transfer tools, azure functions, etc. 18 months later a misconfigured native service got exploited and data exfiltrated. I was brought in for damage control and to crash migrate their stuff into AWS.
Because they didn't know cloud, even being half a dozen career programmers with lots of experience and 4 systems integrations people, they had done just about everything wrong at the cloud level. They didn't enable logging in the native services or vnets, they hadn't implemented proper subnet segmentation, had a very naive Azure AD config, etc. so there were no logs to show what data specifically was lost, or a hard blast radius to provide a known limit. They didn't create the route table to force all inbound traffic through the secure VPN endpoint I provided them that had network inspection, young domain blackholing, etc.
They understood the service endpoints they stood up. An MSSQL interface is an MSSQL interface, as you say. But they didn't know cloud. They didn't understand the separation of provider and customer responsibilities, or security of the cloud vs security in the cloud.
So yeah, since cloud is important to my orgs, when I'm hiring a senior, I want to know they have a basic grasp of the possible, and a respect for the differences so they go into things with their eyes open. I want them to have made at least one prior mistake on the cloud, whether a personal or professional project.
Edit: also:
I did not say the cloud is just running vms... Neither am I saying that hosting postgress is the same as using it in the cloud.
and
A postgress database is a postgress database hosted in your own datacenter or through GCP.
I think we can understand any confusion on the readers part, no? I'm not trying to misrepresent what your say, but we clearly have a disconnect.
Which space is that? My impression of the tech scene, particular certain parts of the tech blogger scene, is that it's often painfully negative, particularly when it comes to things like corporate...
You are right that they often put a spotlight on the bad. I don't think it is a bad thing, in fact I think it is rather refreshing in a space where often negativity does not seem to be really allowed.
Which space is that? My impression of the tech scene, particular certain parts of the tech blogger scene, is that it's often painfully negative, particularly when it comes to things like corporate machinations, how terrible modern developers are, how terrible technology is, and why PMs all suck.
I wish the guy well, it sounds like they're going to get more personally out of doing their own thing, but I can't say any of their stuff, with its deeply cynical vibes, has ever resonated with me and my own experiences of software.
The part of the tech space I am apparently in. I come across tons of blogs with success stories and how they or their company solved "all the issues" with no downsides.
Which space is that?
The part of the tech space I am apparently in. I come across tons of blogs with success stories and how they or their company solved "all the issues" with no downsides.
I think we may see different sides of the tech space then! For me there's a lot of grumbling about anything new or about how bad modern developers are.
I think we may see different sides of the tech space then! For me there's a lot of grumbling about anything new or about how bad modern developers are.
I consider other than a passing mention of specific cloud offering in a job posting a red flag. It usually means "we don't have strong technical leadership" which translates to "we pay you well...
I consider other than a passing mention of specific cloud offering in a job posting a red flag. It usually means "we don't have strong technical leadership" which translates to "we pay you well only if you are a vendor who invites us to a private golf course". Meaning employees are to be bled.
You are very much welcome :) A lot of their other blog posts are also very interesting and cover similar subjects. Although some of them also suddenly are about board games as that was why they...
You are very much welcome :) A lot of their other blog posts are also very interesting and cover similar subjects. Although some of them also suddenly are about board games as that was why they started the blog in the first place.
That's the thing, I don't think he was. At least as far as many people are concerned as they are not realizing how broken and outright ridiculous the functioning of many modern companies is. You...
That's the thing, I don't think he was. At least as far as many people are concerned as they are not realizing how broken and outright ridiculous the functioning of many modern companies is.
You really should read some of the other blog post if you found this one interesting.
Edit: This one specifically in relation to what you just said. Welcome to the mythical third type I guess ;)
I can relate. I work at a great company: tech sector, good benefits, never over 40 hrs/wk, etc. But the corporate BS is really starting to wear on me. For instance, I've been here nearly 7 years,...
I can relate. I work at a great company: tech sector, good benefits, never over 40 hrs/wk, etc. But the corporate BS is really starting to wear on me. For instance, I've been here nearly 7 years, working on consumer facing code, and not a single one of the projects I've worked on have been released. It will always be finished "next year."
Management doesn't know what they want, but they know what they don't want. We have no guidance on what to implement, but management reviews always end in giant reworks. There is a lot of reverting to a prior rework, just to be re-reverted in a month. There have also been giant pivots where projects are effectively thrown away and started over. I've been through two of these, where 10 and 50 of person years have been thrown away (just on my team). I often feel like I've wasted years of my life working on meaningless things.
The kicker is that it's a very stable and profitable company. The graybeards tell me this is how it's always been. It's absurd that this seems to be the norm.
Never having released something is wild to me. I have done projects where after two years we were barely a fraction of where we wanted to be. Having to deal with that for 7 years is something I...
Never having released something is wild to me. I have done projects where after two years we were barely a fraction of where we wanted to be. Having to deal with that for 7 years is something I can barely imagine.
This is wild to me. How are you able to stay motivated? If my work wasn’t being used, I wouldn’t be able to stay for long. I can’t put effort into shelfware, no matter how much someone is paying me.
I've been here nearly 7 years, working on consumer facing code, and not a single one of the projects I've worked on have been released.
This is wild to me. How are you able to stay motivated? If my work wasn’t being used, I wouldn’t be able to stay for long. I can’t put effort into shelfware, no matter how much someone is paying me.
Things have mostly gone this way for me too. Take six months to a year or more to build an application. Only takes that long because the business drags their feet and doesn't want to put in an...
Things have mostly gone this way for me too. Take six months to a year or more to build an application. Only takes that long because the business drags their feet and doesn't want to put in an hour to test the functionality. Towards the end they say "the process changed, we have to add/change this part." I do it. I push the software to production.
They use it for a couple months, likely not even for the full workload, then it gets abandoned.
I've just made myself numb to this reality. My job consists of ripping off businesses with sales for a shitty product, and services contracts to build things they will never truly use.
I've been looking for a new job for a long while but it hasn't happened yet.
I suppose I stay motivated because I'm being paid above the threshold that would actually make me quit. I've worked a few other places (non tech corporate) and know how bad it can get. I also see...
I suppose I stay motivated because I'm being paid above the threshold that would actually make me quit. I've worked a few other places (non tech corporate) and know how bad it can get. I also see the crap jobs and pay friends and family have. I recognize that I have a very good thing going on, regardless of corporate BS.
If the job market was better, I'd be gone. My threshold for BS interviews and grinding leet code is 0... So I keep coasting. I'm definitely often having existential crisis, and I talk about finding a new job every week (my wife can back me up on this).
Imo, a great way to see how good we have it in software and IT is to watch "How it's Made". Working manufacturing looks horrible... At least I'm not placing widgets in a tray for 8 hours a day.
Regardless of what other companies are like, he’s clearly unhappy there? I’ve read some of his other posts. But I think it’s hard to get an overall idea of what “the tech industry” is like. Many...
Regardless of what other companies are like, he’s clearly unhappy there?
I’ve read some of his other posts. But I think it’s hard to get an overall idea of what “the tech industry” is like. Many people are overconfident that they understand this. So I’m skeptical that he’s done it. He’s a talented writer but when not writing about his personal experience, it seems rather vibes-based? He has a rather depressed and angry vibe, and people tend to assume that’s he’s speaking Truth when they are also depressed and angry and can relate. I think he’s telling the truth, but we don’t know how far it generalizes; it’s a vibe.
In the article you link to, he got a biased sample of horrible stories from other unhappy people who related to his posts enough to write to him. I believe those stories are true and it’s good to share them. He rejects anything positive as not what he was writing about. Which is fair, but reinforces his own vibe.
So there’s bad management out there. Good to know! Glad I don’t have to deal with it.
Maybe someone could start a consulting firm that just does audits and shuts expensive, unused cloud services off, for companies that are too dysfunctional to do it themselves? It seems like it would be a good business, which would result in only working with dysfunctional businesses because the ones that know what they’re doing don’t need a consultant to do that.
I don’t know what things are like on average either, but the difference is that I know I’m out of touch. Knowing what things are like on average so you can have an evidence-based opinion on how broken companies are is hard if what you’re going on is social media and limited personal experience; both can systematically mislead. And averages aren’t that meaningful anyway. Most of the time it’s better not to try and just report your own experiences.
I debated for a little while where to put this, the previous blog post by this author was posted in ~comp titled "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again".
Other blog post of the author include gems like
The common theme here is that they are brutally and refreshingly honest about a lot of aspects of the current landscape of working in IT/tech. Which made these posts explode in popularity, resulting in another one named "My Glorious Ascension To Thought Leadership". So maybe ~tech would have been a better overall choice.
However, the post I submitted today basically follows up on all of this and what it all means in regard to their carreer. The realization that some of what they write is not always found in their own actions and what steps they will be taking moving forwards. Which I feel like might make it a good fit in ~life?
I've always found his mindset to be a little odd. He talks about intentionally drinking the bad tea at work because he wants to be reminded of how bad it is. He intentionally keeps mentions of cloud tools off his resume, and wonders why he isn't getting matched with competent employers. He has strong opinions on the right way to do technical work, which probably blind him to other considerations, and he seems to focus on the bad.
I get that a lot of companies suck. That's partly why I choose to work in the nonprofit and education space. But I did consulting for years to supplement my salary, since nonprofits aren't knowing for paying well. I've seen plenty of good and bad, applied for lots of jobs, been recruited, etc.
But like, how can I take someones advice or perspective on the industry too seriously if they don't seem to know how an applicant tracking systems automatically scores resumes, and knows how to state their experience to actually get interviewed by top employers?
So I wish him well on his business. He's chosen a hard way to learn all these noon technical lessons that he should have tried to learn before starting a business. But maybe he beats the odds and makes it.
You are right that they often put a spotlight on the bad. I don't think it is a bad thing, in fact I think it is rather refreshing in a space where often negativity does not seem to be really allowed.
Having said that, you are free to your opinion, of course. Two things did stand out to me though.
How do cloud tools correlate with a competent employer in your mind? I am asking because, I can see the reasoning for not wanting to be employed by companies where specific cloud tooling is valued or valued enough to land you an interview. If a company has a heavy focus on specific cloud tools and less so on other technical aspects, it can be a clear indicator of how they value technical expertise and skill overall. As a lot of cloud skills require you to learn to work with them, not understand the technology itself.
Of course, this is just a generalization, but that is the context we are talking about this anyway.
I am fairly sure they are aware of this. At the same time they are also aware of the fact that for a large part of the actual job openings it is more important to have the right network and not a resume that is designed with the latest recruitment SEO in mind.
Though, I am honestly not sure how that one aspect invalidates their perspective based on actually working in an industry?
It's not any one thing, but several things together that give me an odd vibe.
So, a network is great, but most companies do have a process to follow. The network gets you a foot in the door and maybe the first interview and a good word, but unless it's the CEO you are friends with, your materials do need to stand up to rigor. Additionally, recruiters don't work off of vibes. They do look at your resume and match you to openings that line up, enriched with any first hand knowledge of you that they have.
So all that being said, recruiters often use tools that score resumes to job postings, and so do hiring departments. If your resume doesn't include the sort of table stakes materials, like cloud familiarity often is, then your resume won't score well against that posting and you won't get matched. And if you aren't matching against postings from companies that have their act together and are including good postings with the table stakes references they want, then you end up matching with the B or C tier.
Which gets us back to the tea and him choosing to stop bringing in his own to intentionally drink the bad tea, because it reminds him he's not valued. Maybe?
It creates an impression for me that he is making things harder on himself than it really needs to be, and that might distort his impressions. Maybe he does know how the industry actually vets talent, and chooses to not go along on purpose, which is effectively self sabotage, like the tea. But why? Why do that?
Much of the complaints he has really aren't unique to IT, but are generally symptoms of poor management, which hit accounting and finance and HR the same as IT. Solving those issues by running an IT consulting business won't work. He might enjoy it more, and he might be able to work with better organizations. But you help fix problems with general managers by consulting with our becoming a general manager.
So I wish him well, I really do. But the few posts of his I've read remind me of former colleagues who tended to make life harder for themselves by not looking at non-technical issues in the industry.
In my mind, if someone is a developer who doesn’t claim to have any knowledge of the cloud, it comes across as claiming to not have any knowledge of the cloud, which in turn speaks to a large gap in knowledge about something very basic. If it were true, I would expect it to be correlated with a serious lack of general competence. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to be purposefully omitting it.
Just out of curiosity, what does "the cloud" mean to you? Because when it all comes down to it dealing with a cloud platform like AWS and GCP there actually isn't all that much cloud specific that also can't be found in "old fashioned" datacenters some companies host their things on. A postgress database is a postgress database hosted in your own datacenter or through GCP. The management interfact might be slightly different but a lot of the issues the same.
Of course, a kubernetes environment in GCP works slightly differently as one hosted in your own datacenter. But you can still use the same tooling to work with it.
What I am getting at is that "cloud knowledge" or "cloud experience" aren't all that meaningful. Any competent technical engineer who has worked with the underlying technologies will be able to quickly integrate in an environment where things are hosted in a cloud environment.
So, it only really is a red flag for people who do not realize that the technical skills and mindsets aren't all that different. I can tell you from experience, before last year I technically had very limited "cloud" experience as all the companies I worked at before maintained their own data centers.
I then moved to my current company, where they use GCP. The cloud aspect of it is has never been an issue. The issues we run into are very much the same technical challenges I would also run into with previous companies.
The point I am getting at is that people shouldn't be hired for their cloud knowledge. They should be hired for their technical knowledge first and foremost as that is what cloud knowledge is anyway.
I'm not @unkz, and I sort of agree that cloud can be "somebody else's server" but not completely.
If all a company is doing in the cloud is running VMs, they aren't clouding very well. Or at least they are doing it in the most expensive way possible. Cloud infrastructure as a service is a big Swiss army knife that I expect an expert level IC and certainly a lead to have used. Knowing what services are out there, what works better in the cloud vs on-site, what better allows activity based costing, what avoids local bottlenecks, etc, is all part of what I expect from a technology expert. I say this as a former director of engineering who led all IT engineering teams, cloud, networking, I AM, etc.
So if I'm interviewing someone and all they can tell me about cloud is it's just the same as running a postgres server, but elsewhere, I'd have the same reaction as someone saying Git is really much the same as subversion so I haven't bothered.
The segmentation, automation, and hybrid blending of services is pretty powerful, and the cloud allows for all of that.
I did not say the cloud is just running vms... Neither am I saying that hosting postgress is the same as using it in the cloud.
However, from a technical perspective, when working in either environment, there really as not that big of a difference as you make it out to be. At least not for people who work as part of teams and work with the technologies.
Unless you are thinking that all companies who have their own datacenters do everything still on pure bare metal. Then I'd understand your argument, but that is simply also not the case.
CI/CD pipelines are pipelines everywhere, a relational database is still a relational database with the same queries, code in whatever language is still code in that language no matter the platform, GCP PubSub is just another messaging middleware like Kafka (I'd say PubSuB is technically easier), Kubernetes is still Kubernetes and I could go on and on. Again, for someone with a strong technical background in a modern tech stack "the cloud" isn't all that new even if they technically haven't worked in it.
That's not to say there are no differences, but that is also true when switching companies where they use a different infrastructure, different core libraries, etc. Those are things anyone competent will pick up in short order when onboarding.
Which I know from experience and have seen others do.
In fact, I am even willing to go as far as to say, that someone with a strong technical background will have an easier time switching to a cloud environment than a lot of people who just learned a specific cloud environment will have switching to a different one (say switching from Azure to GCP).
To bring it all back. When we need to add someone to the team, the first thing we look at with is the familiarities with the technologies we use. Familiarity with our environment (GCP) is a plus, but only if all the other prerequisites have been checked.
In fact, from what I know from friends at other companies, they do the same thing. Then again, the friends I am thinking of are working in productive teams and somewhat functional companies, so no surprise there.
After typing this, I also realized that we might be talking from a different perspective. It seems you are focussed on ICs and Lead roles. Where I am talking more broadly about hiring people as part of teams.
With ICs I can understand you wanting to make sure they have deep knowledge of the specific area. Although also there I would argue that for an IC it is more important to showcase that they are able to quickly learn new technologies. Dive into the deep end and figure out if a technology is right for the company.
As far as leads go, sure, there the platform becomes a bit more important. But leads have such responsibilities that they are already a macro level higher compared to most engineers working within teams. They do need to have more insights in costs, etc.
But both roles are a small fraction of the all the people who work in IT and go through the hiring process. And for the majority of people I do strongly believe in what I have written so far.
I agree that when I interview I look primarily for fit, aptitude, and past successes, because specific technical skills can be taught or learned.
That said, I disagree about the lack of all cloud knowledge being not a big deal in this day and age, especially if your organization uses cloud.
The biggest thing is simply knowing what's possible so you know what to explore when a need arise. Is the person aware that serverless databases exist? What are the use cases for a serverless database? If we take on a new customer that requires a HIPAA baa, and we find we need to have an off-site replication X miles from our data center, is the person aware that the cloud has options, and how to start looking them up?
Again, I'm not talking about an entry level position, and I'm not asking them to be able to deploy a VPC and ECS cluster in AWS from the CLI. I'm talking about a technical senior level position and basic knowledge of what's available in the cloud. I expect them to have at least some cloud knowledge because it shows that they are curious, and that they can contribute to brainstorming, even if they aren't part of the implementation for specific cloud environments. Do they know what regions are? General concept of tagging? Pros and cons of serverless? How you extend on on premise network to your cloud environment?
I'll also say I expect software developers, or at least web developers, to be able to use and understand ping and trace route to trouble shoot why their site is down. So maybe I'm just picky, or burnt out explaining ping to uninterested developers who want to submit net out reports when the network is obviously fine.
But on that note of being picky: I always paid folks well, and provided a good work life balance, hybrid work, cooked lunches for my teams on Fridays, approved remote work for extended travel, etc. So to the point of the post, and my earlier point, maybe the best places to work are choosey like me.
As a fun aside, I'll end with a horror story of otherwise competent senior level devs on an enterprise team going down in flames when left to their own devices in the cloud.
I ran the main cloud practice in AWS for a large org. A team of about 10 developers and integrations folks said they wanted to use Azure because of the specific developer tools. I said that I didn't have staff to devote to Azure right now, and their AVP did an end run and they went and got their own Azure environment. They stood up hosted SQL servers, code integrations, native data transfer tools, azure functions, etc. 18 months later a misconfigured native service got exploited and data exfiltrated. I was brought in for damage control and to crash migrate their stuff into AWS.
Because they didn't know cloud, even being half a dozen career programmers with lots of experience and 4 systems integrations people, they had done just about everything wrong at the cloud level. They didn't enable logging in the native services or vnets, they hadn't implemented proper subnet segmentation, had a very naive Azure AD config, etc. so there were no logs to show what data specifically was lost, or a hard blast radius to provide a known limit. They didn't create the route table to force all inbound traffic through the secure VPN endpoint I provided them that had network inspection, young domain blackholing, etc.
They understood the service endpoints they stood up. An MSSQL interface is an MSSQL interface, as you say. But they didn't know cloud. They didn't understand the separation of provider and customer responsibilities, or security of the cloud vs security in the cloud.
So yeah, since cloud is important to my orgs, when I'm hiring a senior, I want to know they have a basic grasp of the possible, and a respect for the differences so they go into things with their eyes open. I want them to have made at least one prior mistake on the cloud, whether a personal or professional project.
Edit: also:
and
I think we can understand any confusion on the readers part, no? I'm not trying to misrepresent what your say, but we clearly have a disconnect.
Which space is that? My impression of the tech scene, particular certain parts of the tech blogger scene, is that it's often painfully negative, particularly when it comes to things like corporate machinations, how terrible modern developers are, how terrible technology is, and why PMs all suck.
I wish the guy well, it sounds like they're going to get more personally out of doing their own thing, but I can't say any of their stuff, with its deeply cynical vibes, has ever resonated with me and my own experiences of software.
The part of the tech space I am apparently in. I come across tons of blogs with success stories and how they or their company solved "all the issues" with no downsides.
I think we may see different sides of the tech space then! For me there's a lot of grumbling about anything new or about how bad modern developers are.
I consider other than a passing mention of specific cloud offering in a job posting a red flag. It usually means "we don't have strong technical leadership" which translates to "we pay you well only if you are a vendor who invites us to a private golf course". Meaning employees are to be bled.
That was a very interesting read. Thank you.
Echoing the same. Enjoyable read. I like this person's writing.
If you like their style of writing, there is a treasure trove available of past blog posts :)
You are very much welcome :) A lot of their other blog posts are also very interesting and cover similar subjects. Although some of them also suddenly are about board games as that was why they started the blog in the first place.
I'm glad he's finally quitting his job since it sounds like it was at a really bad company.
That's the thing, I don't think he was. At least as far as many people are concerned as they are not realizing how broken and outright ridiculous the functioning of many modern companies is.
You really should read some of the other blog post if you found this one interesting.
Edit: This one specifically in relation to what you just said. Welcome to the mythical third type I guess ;)
I can relate. I work at a great company: tech sector, good benefits, never over 40 hrs/wk, etc. But the corporate BS is really starting to wear on me. For instance, I've been here nearly 7 years, working on consumer facing code, and not a single one of the projects I've worked on have been released. It will always be finished "next year."
Management doesn't know what they want, but they know what they don't want. We have no guidance on what to implement, but management reviews always end in giant reworks. There is a lot of reverting to a prior rework, just to be re-reverted in a month. There have also been giant pivots where projects are effectively thrown away and started over. I've been through two of these, where 10 and 50 of person years have been thrown away (just on my team). I often feel like I've wasted years of my life working on meaningless things.
The kicker is that it's a very stable and profitable company. The graybeards tell me this is how it's always been. It's absurd that this seems to be the norm.
Never having released something is wild to me. I have done projects where after two years we were barely a fraction of where we wanted to be. Having to deal with that for 7 years is something I can barely imagine.
This is wild to me. How are you able to stay motivated? If my work wasn’t being used, I wouldn’t be able to stay for long. I can’t put effort into shelfware, no matter how much someone is paying me.
Things have mostly gone this way for me too. Take six months to a year or more to build an application. Only takes that long because the business drags their feet and doesn't want to put in an hour to test the functionality. Towards the end they say "the process changed, we have to add/change this part." I do it. I push the software to production.
They use it for a couple months, likely not even for the full workload, then it gets abandoned.
I've just made myself numb to this reality. My job consists of ripping off businesses with sales for a shitty product, and services contracts to build things they will never truly use.
I've been looking for a new job for a long while but it hasn't happened yet.
Man, I hope you find something, soon!
Food for my child motivates me!
Simpsons did it first!
I suppose I stay motivated because I'm being paid above the threshold that would actually make me quit. I've worked a few other places (non tech corporate) and know how bad it can get. I also see the crap jobs and pay friends and family have. I recognize that I have a very good thing going on, regardless of corporate BS.
If the job market was better, I'd be gone. My threshold for BS interviews and grinding leet code is 0... So I keep coasting. I'm definitely often having existential crisis, and I talk about finding a new job every week (my wife can back me up on this).
Imo, a great way to see how good we have it in software and IT is to watch "How it's Made". Working manufacturing looks horrible... At least I'm not placing widgets in a tray for 8 hours a day.
Regardless of what other companies are like, he’s clearly unhappy there?
I’ve read some of his other posts. But I think it’s hard to get an overall idea of what “the tech industry” is like. Many people are overconfident that they understand this. So I’m skeptical that he’s done it. He’s a talented writer but when not writing about his personal experience, it seems rather vibes-based? He has a rather depressed and angry vibe, and people tend to assume that’s he’s speaking Truth when they are also depressed and angry and can relate. I think he’s telling the truth, but we don’t know how far it generalizes; it’s a vibe.
In the article you link to, he got a biased sample of horrible stories from other unhappy people who related to his posts enough to write to him. I believe those stories are true and it’s good to share them. He rejects anything positive as not what he was writing about. Which is fair, but reinforces his own vibe.
So there’s bad management out there. Good to know! Glad I don’t have to deal with it.
Maybe someone could start a consulting firm that just does audits and shuts expensive, unused cloud services off, for companies that are too dysfunctional to do it themselves? It seems like it would be a good business, which would result in only working with dysfunctional businesses because the ones that know what they’re doing don’t need a consultant to do that.
I don’t know what things are like on average either, but the difference is that I know I’m out of touch. Knowing what things are like on average so you can have an evidence-based opinion on how broken companies are is hard if what you’re going on is social media and limited personal experience; both can systematically mislead. And averages aren’t that meaningful anyway. Most of the time it’s better not to try and just report your own experiences.