[HN Gopher] Trying to sneak in a sketchy .so over the weekend
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Trying to sneak in a sketchy .so over the weekend
Author : ingve
Score : 54 points
Date : 2020-02-09 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| frequentnapper wrote:
| who is this person and why am I seeing blog posts of theirs on hn
| front page two days in a row?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| lmgtfy
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293
| sdan wrote:
| What just happened? I tried reading it but felt like I wasn't
| reading English... when this is clearly in English.
|
| Something about a customer coming into the chat room on a Sunday
| asking to implement a new transport feature... what?
| monkeydreams wrote:
| Yes. This post relies on the reader knowing some background to
| the services/business RbtB supports. She is in the top comments
| on HN relatively often so it probably made more sense to others
| more familiar.
| gpm wrote:
| If you mean you don't understand the jargon, ok.
|
| Otherwise, you might be having a stroke. If so, call 911.
| edoceo wrote:
| Not a customer. A junior dev trying to ship untested code to
| production on a day off. Then later that low quality code
| borked an internal system.
| azernik wrote:
| "There's a time and a place to dig in your heels and say NO to
| something. It usually comes when someone else has been reckless.
| If you do it for everything, then either you're the problem, or
| you're surrounded by recklessness. I think you can figure out
| what to do then."
|
| The magic is in telling the difference.
| techntoke wrote:
| I don't understand the writing style. The situations seem to be
| made up with a level of detail that lacks any real technical
| depth. The whole story could have been summed up into a single
| paragraph and would have been equally as informative and
| enjoyable.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Just reading that, the tone of this person made me cringe. I
| definitely would never want to work with him/her. I can feel the
| negativity and attitude in almost every sentence.
|
| The right thing to do would be to help this person achieve their
| goals while maintaining reliability of the operation. Calling a
| co-worker who is just trying to get something done a rando is the
| epitome of toxicity. She wouldn't last 5 minutes with that
| attitude in my organization.
| toyg wrote:
| Rachel (who is here also as rachelbythebay since 2011) is a
| very old-school sysadmin in many ways, but she's earnt her
| stripes [1]. If she says something is stupid, chances are that
| it is.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, yes and no. In large organizations, with complex things
| that can cause a lot of problems quickly, you do often need to
| have a few people like this. They are, hopefully, not anyone's
| boss, but they may be, for example, the DBA in an organization
| where everyone is hitting the same database and if it gets hung
| up everything in the company grinds to a halt. The "grizzled
| veteran", aka grizzly bear.
|
| The usual result is that if someone finds out they have to do
| something that involves asking the grizzly bear a question,
| they make sure to do lots of due diligence first, and maybe ask
| other people who might know the answer, and only bother the
| grizzly bear if they absolutely have to.
|
| You definitely don't want to have an organization with lots of
| grizzly bears, but it is also the case that a particularly
| high-stakes system sometimes does need a grizzly bear paying
| attention to it, to keep that system from giving everyone a
| great "learning opportunity" on a regular basis. If that's a
| less high-stakes system, then that learning opportunity is
| fine, but if it's something that nearly everyone relies on in a
| large organization, you cannot afford that many outages.
|
| Not saying you're wrong in your evaluation, just saying that
| the same personality type is occasionally useful, or even
| necessary, in certain situations.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Her behavior isn't toxic in the least.
|
| Toxic is playing dumb and bypassing controls on a Sunday to get
| your boss off _your_ back, while dumping a bucket of shit over
| everyone who is obliged to support the company.
| tonyhb wrote:
| Yeah. The author has a good point about _the specific way the
| co-worker went about things_ being wrong. But there was also a
| lack of understanding to explain things. I'm assuming we, the
| blog audience, had a better explanation for "no, just no" than
| the co-worker did.
|
| See another post by this author for a similar tone:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22277582. Maybe work right
| now is tough. It sounds that way.
|
| All that said, a solid takeaway is that sometimes people are
| naive and you need to say no. The next step is: alongside
| saying no, ask what their aim is. You're saying no to the
| solution and you don't know the problem.
| bluedino wrote:
| It sounds like the person was told to stop and directed to the
| people to discuss the correct solution with.
|
| And then it sounds like the person did it anyway, at a later
| date, and broke shit.
|
| If that person repeated that behavior it is someone I wouldn't
| want on the team, or at least having access to certain systems.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Don't know about the tone. What worries me is the company.
| There's no procedure for updates that have far-reaching
| ramifications? Yeah, can see why that would wear you down.
| cwzwarich wrote:
| The author apparently works for Facebook, which makes all of
| the vague language in the story make a lot more sense.
|
| Would Facebook really let somebody do this to every external
| frontend server on a Sunday without some boring authorization
| first? The authorization could simply be denied with a
| boilerplate response about the right way to do things, with
| less emotional resources spent than the author apparently did.
| jcims wrote:
| The author is a veteran in the industry and stories crop up
| from various aspects of her entire career. I wouldn't
| attribute any of them to a particular employer unless she
| indicates it directly or _cough_ indirectly.
| gruturo wrote:
| The kind of people who expect to push untested code to a
| production farm without the slightest intuition that it may
| impact reliability and operations are unfortunately a fixture
| of certain organizations, and after having to argue with them
| for the 100th time, people do get a bit jaded.
|
| Unfair to call the coworker a rando, but these people _did_
| bring systems down at literally the first occasion they managed
| to ship their code, despite having received advice.
|
| I have a similar situation maybe once or twice a year (used to
| be worse when working in other places) and do my best to defuse
| the situation while maintaining politeness and etiquette, but
| this is the tone I'd then use to describe the story to some
| friends.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| Their actual communications with the colleague didn't strike me
| as toxic at all.
|
| It's a blog post, I took their use of "rando" as an artistic
| choice in emphasizing this person had utterly neglected to
| coordinate with any of the stakeholders beforehand, with the
| intent of going into production the next day.
|
| From the perspective of the stakeholders, the person was
| effectively a stranger, and that's the crux of the matter being
| described.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack here. Besides being
| mean and against the rules, it makes for boring reading.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| craftyguy wrote:
| > it makes for boring reading
|
| I didn't find this readers interpretation of the author's
| behavior to be boring. I can see how she may come across as
| being overly combative (though I agree with her goal).
|
| Your frequent comments about what you find to be 'boring'
| _is_ boring.
| miscPerson wrote:
| @dang likes Overton manipulation via pretending to address
| decorum -- a common social control tactic.
|
| In this case, the person broke the unspoken rule of being
| critical of a community member @dang personally likes, so
| we get a grumpy mod post discussing the decorum, but really
| signaling that some people in the community can't be
| criticized for their conduct.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Trying to add a brand new, non-load-tested, non-hardened binary
| to a site with actual reliability requirements 12-24h before
| your deploy is not behavior that demands to be taken seriously.
| Someone serious would have talked to the reliability team
| months, if not quarters, ahead of time and learned eg transport
| and cutout requirements. There are also almost certainly other
| requirements, eg run books.
|
| Let alone on a Sunday afternoon. The whole thing smells like
| someone knew there was a process to do X, figured their X
| wouldn't pass, and tried to bypass the process.
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(page generated 2020-02-09 23:00 UTC)