[conspire] Meanwhile, in birdland (was: Anyone here looking for a s/w job?)

[paulz at ieee.org]

 To me this seems like a naïve person looking at a building.  They see 2x4's holding up the walls.  They don't understand what the nails do.  The decide to remove them and make some money recycling the metal.


    On Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 06:56:53 AM PST, Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:  
 
 On 18Nov2022 08:15PM (-0800), Rick Moen wrote:
> No SREs.  Zero.  Tell that to anyone who's worked in technology at an
> Internet company, and watch the convulsive shudder.
> 
> The amount of irreplaceable institutional knowledge that Twitter, Inc. 
> lost forever over the last few days, especially yesterday, is
> staggering.  

I am largely cribbing from a Mastodon post I made this morning, so here's the link to that: https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo/109370338192137071

In short, a SysAdmin/SRE with a moderate amount of experience in the industry (I consider myself relatively young, still, but the mention of "10+ years experience" makes me realise I run out of fingers and toes before enumerating my own time in this job) posted a long list of disaster scenarios that keep folks like us awake:

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html

All of this is pretty standard, and falls under the kinds of stories we all tell about the failure modes we've scurried to prevent at 3am in various jobs.  These are the kinds of situations where in our disaster recovery plans, we write things like "If our Ceph storage cluster fails entirely, we hire a prominent speechwriter to craft a heartfelt apology to the customers and shareholders, and go find jobs in other industries.  I think I'd like to take up bike mechanics, next go 'round."

But the thing about this thread is that the sound you hear is a thousand printers warming up their infusers around the world: everyone is printing this thread out as supporting evidence.  This kind of list will be blu-tac'd to A0 cardstock and held up before courtrooms in the coming years, illustrating concepts like "reasonable expectation" and "industry common practice".  This purchase didn't just happen with Clyde's own money, and there are bigger fish about to come calling.

I struggled to find the kind of decline we're about to witness, and the closest I could come up with was maybe Howard Hughes.  But that's singularly unfair: Hughes suffered from acute mental illness, and treatment simply wasn't up to the task of helping him in later years.  It's obvious right now that the strongest diagnosis one can give to Clyde here is simply "Hubris".

And don't we all love a good Downfall retitle?

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