alt Hacker NewsWith a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines.
There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
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Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
Every on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.
You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.
It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running."
Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???