Well you'll be happy to know that my comment about democracy was forcibly removed by the mods. I won't repost it since it was made quite clear the opinion contrasted with the mod's opinion and not welcome here.
Your comment was clearly removed because it was unnecessarily hostile. Many other people have made the same point more civilly, and their comments were left alone.
Yeah fuck this account. I'm going to password out of it. Feel free to just delete everything I've written in the past that you don't agree with as well.
I mean, in the primary example given, the bike lane already existed, they just upgraded it.
Personally I'd say it's more of a reaction to the often glacial pace of government action. Cities like SF, Seattle, and NYC have embraced Vision Zero's safety-oriented goals in theory, but are moving very slowly indeed to meet them.
These groups are actually helping the city meet their own self-imposed targets. How does that translate to "fuck democracy"? More like "fuck overly bureaucratic processes" if anything.
I totally agree with your, take, but I'd hedge it and say that if these cities did not enact vision-0, these tactics would occur regardless of tacit approval or explicit intention by gov. Guerrilla implies it's not seeking govt (or broadly popular for that matter) approval.
It's more like.... New street features that don't have an engineer's stamp and may not be compliant with any of a thousand regulations? Time to fucking sue.
To be clear, in all the projects that I've seen by the SFMTrA, the crosswalks or bikelanes already existed—both physically and legally—but their usability was/is extremely compromised due to fundamentally lacking infrastructure and very minimal enforcement of moving violations in San Francisco.
Like Tullius mentions, these are improvements that should have been installed by the government (and may be eventually), but which aren't due to incredibly untimely bureaucratic processes.
I've seen the SFMTA response to these changes and I have a lot of sympathy for them going in and removing them. There are a ton of laws and regulations around how road markings, etc can be changed and the SFMTA has no option other than to follow those laws.
Maybe the guerrilla group should try and tackle some of the regulations and laws rather than point the finger at the SFMTA?
Exactly, if that kind of stuff is OK, then I'd like to make a public call to improve Cesar Chavez St for cars, as the last 'improvement' SFMTA did over there actually transformed the street in a parking lot! :)
This is the first time I've heard about this but I really like what I'm seeing based on what's on the site. This sounds like a really good way to get the candidate you need if you're a BigCorp. I wonder what the acquisition cost of going through Launchcode is vs traditional channels?
I think this is because most companies do pager duty wrong. I highly recommend the google SRE book[0] (notes here[1], chapter 11 covers oncall/pager). One thing mentioned in this book is compensation for being oncall. At Google we get fairly decent pay compensation for holding the pager, enough where it can incentivize people to be on the rotation.
(I'm a software engineer at google who is oncall at this moment)
Thanks for the sources, I'll have to check them out. We've recently spent a considerable amount of time tracking, analyzing and evolving our PagerDuty alerting[0], learnings of which we've shared in a blog post.
> At Google we get fairly decent pay compensation for holding the pager, enough where it can incentivize people to be on the rotation.
Google is a big company. I expect them to 1) Have people in all timezone so that there is no night shift 2) Have many people on rotation so each individual is rarely on shift.
Just some anecdotal about my team at Google. I definitely do night shifts (we do 1 week long rotations), but with a 30-minute SLA on responding to pages. I've had bad nights where my first page happens at 11pm, then they keep going until 4am. The better part is that we are oncall once a quarter or so (12 people on the rotation).
The thing is, there is basically a waiting list to join the rotation. Compensation is nice for those that are motivated by it. But it also exposes you to a lot of the infrastructure that you normally don't deal with (so it's a great way to learn).
We have a higher-up-the-stack SRE team that does 12-hour shifts so it's not as bad for them. They handle the larger scale issues that are beyond job specific issues (ex: datacenter issues).
I can understand this sucking if you are on a small engineering team where you can't do things like this (I've got friends at companies that employ < 10 developers, I've heard the stories). I guess I wasn't thinking about it for smaller eng teams where the number of people available to support the product isn't there.
I agree that it is wage theft the majority of the time. I had a previous gig that paid a 20% salary bonus for months you were on pager duty. If the pager went off, you got a 10% weekly bonus that increased with each incident up to 40% maximum. People fought like cats and dogs to get on pager duty at that place...I wish more businesses took that approach.
If it's unimportant enough that the company can't afford to pay you a large multiple of your normal salary to work on it out-of-hours, it's unimportant enough that it can wait until you're next in the office.
If you're running 24 hours then you should staff for that. If I work my 8 to 10 hours and then have to work another 2 or 3, it tends to wear one down.
Ideally, there would be a financial incentive to fix production bugs so businesses aren't waking up developers. This isn't true when you have exempt employees (US term for no paid overtime) doing your support. I've seen manager go totally friggin stupid with employees who went above and beyond[2].
I still think some managers think we would "code ourselves a mini van"[1] if they paid us for support.
I really don't like the model of throwing support over the wall to some team that didn't write the software. There is no incentive to improve the software under those circumstances, and the people that get paged aren't in the position to fix what's broken.
If you can fix the problem at 3am without thinking, then so can a computer program. Write that computer program.
I remember working at a utility company. I didn't last long (I was the "web master" - oh for the early 2000s), and nor did much of the support staff.
Why? Mainly because we didn't have "authority" to fix things. That had to come from a PM.
It might also have had something to do with the fact that after Ernst & Young came in to do some IT re-structure consulting, we had the situation where:
Support staff were supposed to be on call rotation for pager duty. PMs were not.
PMs were given company cell phones. Support staff were not.
PMs were given company cars. Support staff were not (note that when I say 'support staff' I don't really mean 'help desk' but programming. And this was a government utility where, rightly or wrongly, nearly everyone had a company car).
Someone observed this. Management's response was that the cars and phones gave the PMs "flexibility". Meanwhile support staff were to take calls on their own phones, and if need be drive in to work at 2am in their personal vehicles. PMs were not to be disturbed out of hours.
A little rant-y, but the underlying point? Companies with poor "pager policies" are likely to be problematic all around.
> There is no incentive to improve the software under those circumstances, and the people that get paged aren't in the position to fix what's broken.
My problem is there is no incentive for a company to fix the software if they aren't staffed for support. Also, I see a lot of DevOps people thinking they are the only ones who can fix or diagnose the problems. Often, software developers aren't experienced in networks, databases, or hardware. Thinking that devops is the be all of 24 hour support is a problem.
> If you can fix the problem at 3am without thinking, then so can a computer program. Write that computer program.
I've notice a bit of a link from uncompensated support to allowing time adding fixes to the software.
Frankly, from a hit-by-a-bus problem, if no one but the people who wrote the software can support it, then you really have a problem.
> Frankly, from a hit-by-a-bus problem, if no one but the people who wrote the software can support it, then you really have a problem.
In theory, you have a few people that wrote the software. Who is doing code reviews? If everyone on your team dies in some horrible accident, the software is going to be the least of everyone's concerns.
Vacations are a more reasonable concern. Include vacations in your stated SLO. Support staff tends to want to go on vacation at the Usual Times too (Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4, whatever.)
Personally, I like that solution, but I'm a big fan of "he who breaks it, fixes it".
If I implement a shitty "solution" to a problem and it ends up causing even worse problems then I should be the one to "feel the pain" and it should be my responsibility to fix it/do it over/do it right. Nobody else should suffer because I f--ked up.
> There is no incentive to improve the software under those circumstances
Classy. This comment is 100% exactly the attitude. This is why Step 1 is to find a new job. This poster is punishing you like a parent would a child. Is this the way you want to be looked at and treated? Did you study as hard as you did and spent so much time developing your craft for this?
There are better opportunities out there. 1,000s of them. Avoid the jrockways of the world and you will have a much happier career and life.
without at any point refuting his point about the incentive
Grandparent post described a way to create incentive. He posited that without it there wasn't incentive, he did not prove - nor even attempt to argue - that it was the only (or best) way to create incentive.
ability to respond quickly to outages
Depending on the nature of a problem and training of the people involved, there is zero reason to assume the programmer of an application is more qualified to triage and remedy an outage than someone specializing in operations. The problem could be in the infrastructure around the app. Even if the underlying problem is something the developer is well suited to fix, they still might not be have the expertise to deliver the best temporary solution to get online ASAP, and stay there until the real fix can be landed in the codebase.
To conclude, parent poster does not need to waste breath articulating why such obviously fallacious reasoning is bullshit.
> ... there is zero reason to assume the programmer of an application is more qualified to triage and remedy an outage than someone specializing in operations.
That's why we've got AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and so on, right? The programmer gets to deal with only their code and let someone else worry about the rest of the infrastructure.
If you're running 24 hours then you should staff for that.
Right, so what's the problem? The original article isn't talking about putting people who aren't paid for pager duty on pager duty. The OP is whining about the mere idea of it and suggesting that if you have that job you should quit.
Anything in the world can be part of a job description. That speaks nothing about if it is reasonable or ethical.
Many, many, many industries have overnight staff to handle these issues, but likely because software engineers tend to be young, lack a union and are paid salary with no overtime compensation, it is somehow acceptable in this industry. Which is why I honestly asked that question. Why do you and the above poster, find it so normal to be on pager duty when so many other industries, often with much more critical services, do not require it?
Why do you, and the above poster, find it so normal to be on page duty when so many other industries, often with much more critical services, do not require it.
False premise. Many jobs require it, including low paid ones across many industries. Many of my jobs which were not in IT required it sometimes (like working at a golf course and being called out for a jammed golf cart garage door in one case - which I clocked hours for btw).
If it's part of your job description and the salary you get covers it then I'm not seeing why you should "find a different job."
> If it's part of your job description and the salary you get covers it then I'm not seeing why you should "find a different job."
Two reasons:
1. Your salary doesn't cover night and weekend pages in most first world countries regarding labor law (the US is backwards in this regard, but luckily the economy does well enough at the moment jobs are a plenty).
2. Quality of life. If your job requires on call rotation, interrupting your off-work hours or your sleep, and you're not getting paid enough (<$100K/year), immediately start seeking out another job. It's a sellers market.
Real industries that run 24-hours a day and have to be up all the time, run three shifts, they don't screw their day-shift into having to be available at the drop of a hat to cover.
They also pay significant overtime multipliers when they do have to call somebody in outside of their scheduled hours.
There is at least one big company out there, where every dev is part of what they call the "on call rotation" -- where being "on call" typically means being on pager duty -- without any special compensation for that. The only exemption is if you're working on a project that isn't yet in production. They tell you about it during their recruitment process and they communicate it very clearly: take it or leave it, there are no special cases. It sucks, but a lot of people take it anyway.
Yup. We're on call for a week at a time. Only compensation is the "privilege" of working from home on the Friday of the week we're on call. No extra pay, no comp time, nada. Luckily the number of calls is very low, maybe 1-2 per week.
Step 0: Agree, on the condition that any alert received outside working hours becomes a priority task for someone the next day -- whether that means them fixing a bug, adjusting the alert, or investigating and explaining why the cause is extremely unlikely to recur.
This is working well for me, has improved the service for users, and has made our monitoring system much more useful. (Alerts used to be about as accurate as "Main website broken", but are now more like "microservice X is taking >10s to respond".)
Last time I was on paid pager duty there was a slim likelihood that there would be any chance of the 3 a.m. call. Therefore we had a strict rota as it would have been unfair if someone was getting all of the free cash. This only amounted to £300 a month due to everyone wanting to be on the rota, however, I am sure that paid for my Christmas by the end of the year.
Plus the minor incidents that did happen also turned out to be good team moments, everyone would hear that 'you fixed it'. Okay you did reboot-retry on that file server that wasn't responding and everything was fine five minutes later, but a lot of knowledge went into pressing that reboot button and, as far as manager types are concerned, you saved the day. To their non-technical minds that could be voodoo wizardry so they are pleased, feather in cap given.
I also believe that doing some out of hours emergency support is good for one's own education, you are able to think quickly on your feet as it is a heightened urgent situation at hand. Just being placed in this position helps you gain experience of this type of problem solving. Total focus on the task in hand is easily achievable, one is not thinking about lunch or going home and only half focused.
Once you have that experience then find a new job!
> Okay you did reboot-retry on that file server that wasn't responding and everything was fine five minutes later, but a lot of knowledge went into pressing that reboot button and, as far as manager types are concerned, you saved the day.
You likely understood the consequences of your action too (and if not, you just learned! :P )
It is only reasonable to hold that stance if it goes both ways. If you consider it wage theft to expect you to work on-call hours, then you also must consider it proper work ethic to always work 40 hours a week, never taking an afternoon to... well, do anything. 40 hours, no more, no less. Don't be late in the morning, either.
If that is how you want to work, there are certainly jobs that offer it.
Unpaid internships are a way for companies / organizations to know that the intern comes from an affluent background because poor people cannot afford to do those types of internships.
Good luck getting rid of something that keeps it all in the club.
Personally. I'm a free-market type and so I struggle with any moral objection to these internships. But I find it amusing that internships are so popular within institutions (govt, media, big tech) full of people with politics that should find fault with them.
By contrast: when I was the work experience boy at an electrical goods maker, I would have accepted no pay (I needed it for Uni). But they made sure to pay me out of a sense of professionalism.
> Personally. I'm a free-market type and so I struggle with any moral objection to these internships. But I find it amusing that internships are so popular within institutions (govt, media, big tech) full of people with politics that should find fault with them.
Same story here. I am truly amazed at the people who talk to me about opportunity and diversity and still have unpaid internships. It is an amazingly effective filter for a certain class of individual.
> By contrast: when I was the work experience boy at an electrical goods maker, I would have accepted no pay (I needed it for Uni). But they made sure to pay me out of a sense of professionalism.
The vocational fields got it right with paid apprenticeships. Shows the value of your work increasing as your skill and knowledge does.
Maybe I was down voted because my comment was too brief. In the U.S. companies bid on and purchase wireless spectrum which they then own in perpetuity.
Please, I beg you not to let go of your compassion for human life. These people obviously had troubled lives and went through great amounts of pain. There is a time and a place for debates about gender equality, but I don't feel like it is helping anyone to do it here. With that said I understand your frustration and sincerely wish you well.
When a reporter drives out into what they think of as "hicksville" looking for a quote that can be ginned up into a big story[0], that is one thing. When the subject of the story has to close up shop due to death threats for holding a position on gay marriage held by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton circa 2009, now we're shading into that "will decide how everyone lives" territory.
Why would documentation about docker include basic fundamental knowledge about deploying services in production? This isn't docker knowledge, this is service based architecture 101. Why is it docker's responsibility to teach you general software engineering concepts?
