Neither is: any complex manufacturing technique, chemical or pharmacology synthesis, drilling for oil, building a mile of interstate highway, assembly of automobiles etc but I don't think someone with 2 years of experience could either cause significant process damage or process improvement at these complex and expensive activities.
I am therefore regularly shocked by how much money is poured into or otherwise spent on tech and tech workers and how laughable the result is. I've really never seen a server infrastructure at any company where I haven't shuttered in horror within a few hours of looking at design, practices, or systems themselves. When I was much more junior I was perplexed by the sudden appeal of i.e. AWS EC2 but then I've seen from the inside multinational conglomerates try to acquire and deploy servers (i.e. just the logistics that a non-technical person could handle, no software) and understand. The irony to me is, if you fail at logistics, you have near zero chance of doing anything else right, so cloud doesn't reduce your liability much unless it is fully managed like GApps or Salesforce. This should be a huge warning sign for a variety of stakeholders, but money's cheap and the livin's easy right now.
> I am therefore regularly shocked by how much money is poured into or otherwise spent on tech and tech workers and how laughable the result is. I've really never seen a server infrastructure at any company where I haven't shuttered in horror within a few hours of looking at design, practices, or systems themselves.
Yet, all these companies remain in existence.
Maybe what you consider to be "laughable" is actually "good enough" when it comes down to dollars and cents?
Existence doesn't mean much in times of quantitative easing; pick your favorite punching bag company in recent memory that is still extant. If you don't understand the economic situation backing all this it's hard to discuss your rebuttal further so we need to checkpoint there before I invest any time on more responses.
The issue is largely orthogonal to my own skillset because one needs to only view quality regressions in order to assert my point, not be the cause or hero of them (ain't philosophy generous?!). The times a 2 year experience system operator could go in and wreck havoc on a mainframe operation were not particularly common and the standards and practices (i.e. airgapped backups on tape, geographically dispersed sysplex etc) ensured business continuity were generally planned right in from the initial purchase order with the vendors' help once upon a time. In this decade people can and did launch massive financial exchanges on mongodb when it had serve and well known issues.
Good enough according to whom? Inevitably there's always some unpatched server somewhere on the network someone forgot about that let hackers access data for millions of customers.
You find the server infrastructure at every company you’ve seen to be poor, so you must have something better. If you have something objectively better then why aren’t you cashing in on this knowledge (and improving the service or product for the customers too) and improve the server infrastructure at one of these companies?
I would love to. See Dan Luu's big company pay statistics. Want to fund me to ignore that? I don't think anyone would (aka bubble, value creation detached from valuation). I'll just save what I can, try not to rock the boat too much for the people underwriting my salary in any direction good or bad, and hope to GTFO before complete burnout.
I am therefore regularly shocked by how much money is poured into or otherwise spent on tech and tech workers and how laughable the result is. I've really never seen a server infrastructure at any company where I haven't shuttered in horror within a few hours of looking at design, practices, or systems themselves. When I was much more junior I was perplexed by the sudden appeal of i.e. AWS EC2 but then I've seen from the inside multinational conglomerates try to acquire and deploy servers (i.e. just the logistics that a non-technical person could handle, no software) and understand. The irony to me is, if you fail at logistics, you have near zero chance of doing anything else right, so cloud doesn't reduce your liability much unless it is fully managed like GApps or Salesforce. This should be a huge warning sign for a variety of stakeholders, but money's cheap and the livin's easy right now.