you forgot "2024 New Version"

Yep this is it.

Of course during the first RTO push I repeatedly told all my colleagues that the natural evolution in the minds of leadership is going to be "if their job can be done from Lake Tahoe it can be done from Bangalore."

Now our company is implementing a McKinsey designed plan to move the bulk of our employment to India. The expectation is that headcount will go up but with much cheaper resources. McKinsey insists that they've done this a bunch of times with different companies and it's gone swell.

There are an awful lot of memory safe languages. For example Python, Java, JavaScript, and the safe subset of C#. Rust just happens to achieve memory safety with a relatively low runtime overhead.

> I watched the same thing happen at the grocery store earlier where a couple picked up a package of steaks, lamented that it was going to cost them X hours of work, and then threw them in the basket anyway.

What are they supposed to do? Meat is generally considered an inelastic good [1] unlike your concert example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Actually any organisation worthy of the label "engineer" should do a thorough, no-blame, and collaborative post-mortem of such events so they don't happen again, and that would include warnings given.

Feature on time + risk, feature late + no risk (and anything in between), it's in the end an engineering and business decision and either choice might be the right one depending on the circumstances.

I’ve started doing something like this more frequently, but it is in the interest of job security / cover-my-butt rather than pettiness.

I build something that depends on many systems that others have created and that uses data from probably about every dataset we have. What I build also has very high customer visibility. So whenever something breaks upstream, the first place customers notice the problem is in the system I maintain. Psychologically, people begin to develop a mental association around your system being a “problem” if it keeps getting brought up as the starting point of SEV discussions and customer tickets.

As a result, a lot of what I do now is defensive. I investigate and reverse engineer upstream codebases to identify likely failure modes, and I spend hours analyzing datasets of questionable origin for data quality issues and inconsistencies. I document and date stamp all of the problems that I find, file bug reports and assign them to the relevant teams, and write proposals describing potential solutions to what I see as large architectural design flaws that will come back to haunt us at some point.

All of this work is promptly ignored with “not enough bandwidth right now” or “not a priority compared to feature development”. Which is fine. I document all of those responses too.

Then eventually, something breaks in a big way that is again first noticed by customers within the system I am responsible for. In the past, I would immediately drop what I was doing and scramble into investigation mode for a few days to prove I wasn’t the root cause of the X hundred thousand dollar issue, er... I mean the blameless SEV review & postmortem... but more recently my preemption seems to be paying off, and lately I just reply to the panic with a bunch of links to old Slack threads (where we already discussed the issue), the documents and proposals I created (that no one read), or the bug reports I filed (that were never followed up on).

Perhaps it does come across as a bit petty, but I try to be as polite as I can, and from my perspective it’s an improvement over the previous situation. The only downside is that all of this preventative work takes away time from the primary work that I was hired to do.

Anyone else tired from these stories?

1. It’s obvious 2. Do they even get any engagement? Americans can’t be that dumb 3. I might sometimes accidentally identify as American on the internet “we” and refer to their elections as “our elections” despite being Japanese. It makes people less toxic and suspicious or maybe I’ve just been consuming too much English media

A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and South America. All three felt betrayed by the US government. They said, essentially, "We put our lives on the line many times to try to stop the flow of drugs. Then the government turned around and basically gave the pharmaceuticals license to sell this stuff professionally, through people's personal physicians."

These retired agents didn't see the drug war as a war on "bad guys," but as an effort to stop the destruction drugs wrought in people's lives. After all their work, their own government undermined their efforts.

My own doctor was taken in by Big Pharma's sales pitch and wound up going to prison for over-prescribing their pills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurwitz. Though to hear Big Pharma tell it, there was no such thing as over-prescribing.

If you want to get an idea of how out-of-hand the prescription frenzy got, take a look at John Temple's book American Pain, which describes the pill mills in South Florida. Towns in Appalachia used to send charter buses to these pharmacies. After a 12-20 hour bus ride, each passenger would pick up hundreds or thousands of pills, then ride home to sell them in their small country towns.

Some of the pill mills, which were fully licensed by the state of Florida, were cash-only and would haul garbage bags full of money to the bank each day at closing. For a summary of Temple's book, see https://adiamond.me/2020/01/american-pain-by-john-temple/

Aren't these the same older Americans who keep voting for people who promise to abolish any attempts at improving the American healthcare debacle?