oh god i felt this one. Devs too busy, incompetent or just plain lazy to figure out why their code is so slow, so just have ops throw more CPU and memory at it to brute force performance. Then ops gets to try to explain to management why we are spending $500k per month to AWS to support 50 concurrent users.
The sad thing: Throwing hardware at a problem was actually cheaper for a long time. You could buy that $1500 CPU and put it in your dedicated server, or spend 40 developer hours at $100 a pop. Obviously I’m talking about after the easy software side optimizations have already been put in (no amount of hardware will save you if you use the wrong data structures).
Nowadays you pay $500 a month for 4 measly CPU cores in Azure. Or “less than 1 core” for an SQL Server.
Obviously you have a lot more scalability and reliability in the cloud. But for $500 a month each we had a 16 core, 512 GB RAM machine in the datacenter (4 of them). That kind of hardware on AWS or Azure would bankrupt most companies in a year.
Well, having been on the other side, sometimes the Dev is also trying to fight the good fight whilst having to use some crap 3rd party system/library that’s imposed from above because somebody at the C-suite level after suitably dinned and wined (and who knows what more, including implied or even explicit promises for the future of their career) signed a massive agreement with one of the big corporate software providers so now those of us at the coalface have to justify to money spent on that contract by using every POS from said big corporate software provider.
I mean, I might be exagerating the overtly corrupt nature of the deal (in my experience its more a mix of CTO incompetence - or being pretty much powerless at the C-Suite level because his is not the core business, hence overriden - and the high-level management trading favours using company money and more for personal rather than corporate reasons) but even competent devs that know their thing can’t really do much when they have to use a bug-riddled POS massive framework from some vendor that doesn’t even have proper support, for “corporate reasons”.
I got somebody at the C-suite level fired after I presented evidence of him wining and dining with a shit supplier (actually being buddy buddy and literally dining with him on a weekly basis), also for not knowing the consequences of his decisions and also for him bring unable to keep his hands off employees below him (me included).
Within 3 months there were 5 severe complaints against him with the CEO and humans resources.
The company had whistleblower protections but obviously fired me for my troubles as well anyway.
I don’t care, the fucker was evil and the company honestly too and I’m happy I’m gone there.
It sucked in the moment, but now I’m more than fine with it. I see the company for what it is now, quite evil and a detriment to society. I’m happy I’m gone there.
oh god i felt this one. Devs too busy, incompetent or just plain lazy to figure out why their code is so slow, so just have ops throw more CPU and memory at it to brute force performance. Then ops gets to try to explain to management why we are spending $500k per month to AWS to support 50 concurrent users.
The sad thing: Throwing hardware at a problem was actually cheaper for a long time. You could buy that $1500 CPU and put it in your dedicated server, or spend 40 developer hours at $100 a pop. Obviously I’m talking about after the easy software side optimizations have already been put in (no amount of hardware will save you if you use the wrong data structures).
Nowadays you pay $500 a month for 4 measly CPU cores in Azure. Or “less than 1 core” for an SQL Server.
Obviously you have a lot more scalability and reliability in the cloud. But for $500 a month each we had a 16 core, 512 GB RAM machine in the datacenter (4 of them). That kind of hardware on AWS or Azure would bankrupt most companies in a year.
Well, having been on the other side, sometimes the Dev is also trying to fight the good fight whilst having to use some crap 3rd party system/library that’s imposed from above because somebody at the C-suite level after suitably dinned and wined (and who knows what more, including implied or even explicit promises for the future of their career) signed a massive agreement with one of the big corporate software providers so now those of us at the coalface have to justify to money spent on that contract by using every POS from said big corporate software provider.
I mean, I might be exagerating the overtly corrupt nature of the deal (in my experience its more a mix of CTO incompetence - or being pretty much powerless at the C-Suite level because his is not the core business, hence overriden - and the high-level management trading favours using company money and more for personal rather than corporate reasons) but even competent devs that know their thing can’t really do much when they have to use a bug-riddled POS massive framework from some vendor that doesn’t even have proper support, for “corporate reasons”.
I got somebody at the C-suite level fired after I presented evidence of him wining and dining with a shit supplier (actually being buddy buddy and literally dining with him on a weekly basis), also for not knowing the consequences of his decisions and also for him bring unable to keep his hands off employees below him (me included).
Within 3 months there were 5 severe complaints against him with the CEO and humans resources.
The company had whistleblower protections but obviously fired me for my troubles as well anyway.
I don’t care, the fucker was evil and the company honestly too and I’m happy I’m gone there.
That is good to hear (except the part about them firing you in the end).
It sucked in the moment, but now I’m more than fine with it. I see the company for what it is now, quite evil and a detriment to society. I’m happy I’m gone there.
You and me both