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   Valerie Aurora (vaurora@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:40 JST Valerie Aurora

   in reply to

   • Mⱺ℠

   @nevali it me

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:41 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     for real tho it took me a 25+ year career before i noticed that being able to see from top to bottom of a massive complex system and point at where you should make a change is actually both a rare and valued skill

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:42 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     i THINK the "overheads" of maintaining a system rise exponentially with complexity

     eventually that will exceed the size of your engineering workforce

     (IBM definitely also fell into this trap MANY times btw but their margins were such that they didn't go bust because of it—i.e., they're extortionate because they priced all this in)

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:43 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     yeah ok and making them too

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:44 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     that's why i do architecture now, after so many years reading other people's repeated mistakes, i have Strong Opinions and have a job in which this is literally in the description

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:45 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     i tell junior engineers half-wryly that i spent 80% of my software development keyboard time *reading* other people's code and at most 20% writing code and they definitely always want to believe that i'm lying, joking, or not representative, but if anything i'm wildly overstating the lines of code written

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:46 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     also i'm fairly sure that Apple, like EVERY other software-developing company except perhaps IBM, has fallen into the trap of believing that writing new software is the hard bit and maintaining existing software is just "overheads"

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:47 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     this is how you get Bitcoin PDFs in shipping OS images—Apple has zillions of employees but proportionally few engineers for all the things it's trying to do (judging by several indicators, waaaaay too few), or QA teams, or whatever

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:48 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     you know when there was the big furore about Apple and Google sidestepping governments to implement Covid tracking their way, did you ever stop to think how many actual Bluetooth experts Apple and Google have on staff and how many meetings (in a rising pandemic!!) ceding to all those govt requests would have amounted to? like we're talking 3-4 guys each tops, and dozens of govts saying "no! do it our way!!"; they HAD to JFDI

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:49 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     and objectively this is highly dysfunctional, and yet entirely normal

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:50 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     like i've been cooking up a proposal for a thing at work and it will get reviewed by literally dozens if not hundreds of people BUT part of it proposes making something the responsibility of the team it arguably (i am arguing) it should be managed by—so far so good, except i know that "make it the responsibility of that team" actually translates to it being added to one specific person's workload, so i am going to have to check with both them and their boss before i circulate anything

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:51 JST Mⱺ℠

     in reply to

     it's not like you multiply up the workforce but keep doing the same scale of stuff—that might actually be sustainable—instead orgs seem to track "complexity of operations" on a log scale against workforce size and i am genuinely not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg

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     Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 13:32:52 JST Mⱺ℠

     i always find it fascinating that when you have a large organisation, instead of lots of people being responsible for a small number of critical things, as you might expect, what in fact happens is that a small—and in fact insignificant relative to the size of the organisation—number of people end up being responsible for a monstrous number of things