Comment by lordleft 3 days ago
I've enjoyed Krazam's other videos, but at the risk of having the joke explained (and thus spoiled), what exactly is this lampooning? Not asking from a critical place, I legitimately am curious about dysfunctional business processes at other companies and want to know if people really are drowning in SaaS access requests
Personally I think the successful automation ending would've been "too satisfactory and perfect". Real life is not that.
I felt the video was relatable to me in many frequent situations where I would like to automatize some sort of process, but I end up being overly enthusiastic, because I'm so biased towards automating routineus activities. I frequently end up spending more time automating something than it would've been worth to just do it couple of times. I end up creating PoCs that don't entirely work in situations like those and the demos can fail, because I got bored at some point and didn't check thoroughly enough, so this video made me cringe at myself.
I do feel however that this was just one layer of this video, and the other layer is about the other side where manual processes are preferred for irrational reasons over automation, so I think this video accurately reflected all sides of the story. Automating vs doing something routineusly is a balancing and tolerance act.
I have fought this battle for my entire career. The problem is, incentives are tough - often senior engineers on ops teams have built the system on duct tape and bubble gum, and have a very specific and unobtainable knowledge about all the quirks of it which frequently involve a ton of manual, esoteric shit to resolve without a lot of know-how.
Part of how I’ve made myself useful as a consultant sometimes in my career is by insisting on a strict set of processes that break down and identify bottlenecks like this. It’s almost always ops, it almost always can be automated, but there’s “no bandwidth or budget” to fix the problems so they expect superheroes to constantly save the day by pulling absurd hours or by inventing genius solutions that management buys into.
For me, as an IC or sometimes as a consultant, I try to chip away. We spend X minutes a week doing Y thing manually. what’s the easiest thing we can do to reduce X? and then slowly introduce whatever arises out of those processes, and then slowly “eat the elephant” one bite at a time.
when people come into a big messy manual legacy system they often, imho, make the mistake of wanting to tear it down and recreate it from scratch. having done several cloud architecture/IAC refactors in my career, I can tell you its definitely a way easier sell to management and other teams to whittle away at it than to recreate it entirely, and i think that’s also what the video is poking fun at. There’s always skeletons that your perfect solution will run into. Processes, standards, and monitoring will expose these dead bodies, but it’s not a one shot solution and I’m immediately skeptical when anyone proposes something in this space that is. Every situation is a snowflake.
> Every situation is a snowflake.
Yeah, I mean, I think this describes it. Ultimately the video had many thoughts and layers, starting with a charismatic lead who is proud or pretending to be proud about completely meaningless, arbitrary achievements and metrics trying to motivate his team for rejecting access requests. Then it goes on to this individual who just can't handle it. Which is relatable. I don't think I could be able to perform a job like this at all. So I think this individual there was just so badly misplaced for handling this type of work - he really wanted out from there, but unfortunately it is not always so simple. In an ideal world he would've worked in another role.
Yes. It's so bad where I work now that IT delegated approvals back to the managers. So now whenever you hire a new engineer, you have to click approve on all the systems they need access to do their job, because apparently RBAC doesn't scale to FAANG. And then they need to re-apply, and you need to re-approve, every year because virtually no accounts are 'forever' approved.
And since many of these are "per-seat" licensing, finance is always cajoling IT into aggressively culling unused accounts. Which makes it to these poor bastards's DMs early in the screen, and the corresponding IT ticket hell of people requesting their access back.
The punchline at the end is basically just hubris: you've solved the megacorp RBAC problem in your head, but trip over the BS logistics of it all. Probably because your application doesn't have network permissions or some other ironic problem.
I find the ending particularly funny, we have a small team where we're often building things in-house that we should probably just buy, or rely on manual processes for.
The fumbling with "oops, there's some test data in here" and the issues with the service worker hit a little close to home from some of our demos I've been a part of.
If you've ever worked in an org that has to be SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) compliant, then you are familiar with a bunch of what's happening in this video. So much of your data, infra, and internal tools have to be gated by authorization and access logging tools -- so employees are constantly requesting access to the tools they need to get their work done.
These requests can be granted manually or automatically but they need to be logged and stored. Sometimes requests are required for every single access of a tool and sometimes it's time period based (24 hour access to Redshift or whatever) -- usually this depends on your role in an org. There isn't a coherent out-of-the-box way to provide the authorization and access gateways across all the different tools a business relies on -- so there is a big business opportunity for companies to basically provide turnkey identity and access management tools for companies.
Or, occasionally, an engineer loses their mind with the inefficiencies of these systems and processes and goes off on a jag to create the perfect internal tool to solve all these problems. That rarely (if ever) works, hence the video.
What I don't get here is the title. It's either referring to the employee who goes and creates the autonomous system, or even the system itself, but is "high agency" a corp buzzword the same way IC is?
Lol, yes, you can extend this same bit to any team that deals with a lot of ops. Usually goes like this -
Too many requests come in for one team to handle. No budget to hire more bodies, or maybe you've already reached a point where that will no longer scale - the work can usually be automated completely, but stopping and taking the time to automate it will result in a 100% loaded team KPI's dropping significantly, meaning you'll almost never get management buy-in or any time to do it, leaving you in a perpetual cycle of manual work requests flooding in like in this scene.
I was kind of hoping the ending would be his tool worked and they all got laid off - actually seen this happen.