Comment by JohnMakin

Comment by JohnMakin 3 days ago

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.

mewpmewp2 3 days ago

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.

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JohnMakin 2 days ago

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.

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- mewpmewp2 2 days ago
  
  > 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.
  
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  JohnMakin 2 days ago
  
  Yea, this video is definitely relatable to a lot of people in a lot of ways and that’s what I love about these. They hit hard. For me particularly, I have trouble selling to stubborn management teams to delay projects just a tiny bit to allow refactoring or adjustments to automate time wasting shit, and I abhor toil to the core of my being - so I will often get into situations like this guy and be like “fuck it I’m fixing it myself.”
  I’ve had similar failures as in this video, lol. As a leader and as an IC. It hits really hard. If you’re ever in this situation you have to either leave, or exact whatever measures you have to fix it. Or face inevitable burnout. Those are the only choices or you will go mad.
  
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  mewpmewp2 2 days ago
  
  Some other interesting thoughts I had about the video:
  1. The team lead was somehow able to leave an impression of Matthew McConaughey from The Wolf of Wall Street so strongly, I don't know if that was intentional. The whole acting felt amazing actually in such a weird way...
  2. The Slack sound effects, I assume this has to be traumatizing to everyone watching this video, right.
  
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jldugger 3 days ago

Personally, I was expecting him to solve the problem but then be faced with a "now you have 18 standards" problem of having to approve access to his new tool via tickets.

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