[HN Gopher] My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never...
___________________________________________________________________
 
My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
 
Author : mooreds
Score  : 74 points
Date   : 2023-03-02 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
 
web link (blog.dijit.sh)
w3m dump (blog.dijit.sh)
 
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Our remote manager bought us an expensive HP floor-mount server
| like a dishwasher. It was over spec'd and underpowered. And we
| didn't need a server, not for work.
| 
| My colleague loaded up his entire ripped CD collection and we got
| Bluetooth headphones and had it serve up tunes all day. Back when
| that was a thing. Only thing it ever did.
 
| kubb wrote:
| My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him
| around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-
| directed. He can't understand technical issues, and whenever he
| proposes something, it's completely untenable due to his lack of
| understanding what's useful or possible.
 
  | telotortium wrote:
  | Are they planning on hiring more reports?
 
  | roncesvalles wrote:
  | He's around so that your skip has to manage 1 person instead of
  | 2.
 
  | bitlad wrote:
  | Atleast your manager doesn't do anything. I have seen managers
  | who do stuff and ruin the work that people have done.
 
    | amanj41 wrote:
    | "But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of,
    | for he is too dangerous"
 
  | lordnacho wrote:
  | Chesterton's Manager?
 
  | MathMonkeyMan wrote:
  | I'm beginning to think that making more money by becoming a
  | better developer is hard, and that managing, while difficult in
  | a totally different way, is less hard. At least for the money.
 
    | nickpeterson wrote:
    | I think people often convince themselves that becoming a
    | manager is a path for those who couldn't hack it. In reality
    | it's a completely different set of problems. If you're a
    | decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very
    | good chance you'd be better in management or sales than
    | writing code.
 
      | colechristensen wrote:
      | In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo
      | cult activities mostly involving power point presentations
      | and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it
      | seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend
      | went towards satisfying the VP's appetite for reporting
      | when engineers were very understaffed they focused on
      | expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring
      | ICs.
      | 
      |  _some_ of this management can be useful but often a lot of
      | it is not, at best. As organizations age companies become
      | mostly about advancing careers of middle management and the
      | things the company actually does become secondary.
 
    | yunwal wrote:
    | Being a good manager is in my experience just as hard if not
    | harder. But, it's much easier to be a bad manager and keep
    | your job.
 
    | mikepurvis wrote:
    | Having been both, being a really good manager is hard in a
    | very different set of ways.
    | 
    | Depending what itch you're trying to scratch, and what
    | opportunities are available in your org, it might be just as
    | rewarding to be a tech lead, feature lead, mentor, cross-team
    | liaison, steering committee member, or possibly other roles
    | rather than team lead / manager.
 
  | Gigachad wrote:
  | My manager isn't a programmer but uses ChatGPT to educate
  | himself on a topic and attempts to read the code to see what's
  | happening before asking one of us if anything is still unclear.
 
    | nickpeterson wrote:
    | You know, summarizing what code does in regular English via
    | ChatGPT would be an interesting thing. Does it already do
    | that?
 
      | drc500free wrote:
      | It definitely can do this, though obviously it can details
      | wrong here and there. For example:
      | Describe what this code does in clear english:
      | from datetime import datetime         import pytz
      | utcmoment_naive = datetime.utcnow()         utcmoment =
      | utcmoment_naive.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)              #
      | print "utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive) #
      | python 2         print("utcmoment_naive:
      | {0}".format(utcmoment_naive))         print("utcmoment:
      | {0}".format(utcmoment))              localFormat =
      | "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"              timezones =
      | ['America/Los_Angeles', 'Europe/Madrid',
      | 'America/Puerto_Rico']              for tz in timezones:
      | localDatetime = utcmoment.astimezone(pytz.timezone(tz))
      | print(localDatetime.strftime(localFormat))
      | 
      | ChatGPT Response:
      | 
      | This Python code does the following:                 1.
      | Imports two modules, datetime and pytz.       2. Gets the
      | current time in UTC using the datetime module and assigns
      | it to a variable named 'utcmoment_naive'.       3. Uses the
      | pytz module to create a timezone-aware datetime object and
      | assigns it to a variable named 'utcmoment'.       4. Prints
      | the values of the 'utcmoment_naive' and 'utcmoment'
      | variables.       5. Defines a date format to be used for
      | printing local date and time.       6. Defines a list of
      | three timezones.       7. Loops over the list of timezones
      | and converts the UTC time to the local time in each
      | timezone using the 'astimezone' method of the 'datetime'
      | object and the 'pytz.timezone' method.       8. Prints the
      | local time in each timezone in the specified date format.
      | 
      | Overall, this code gets the current time in UTC, converts
      | it to the local time in three different timezones, and
      | prints the local time in each timezone in a specified
      | format.
 
      | thatcherthorn wrote:
      | Correct
 
| znpy wrote:
| The author makes a good progression in their reasoning but then
| somehow arrives to the wrong conclusion:
| 
| > So when someone says that Amazon has invested a lot of money
| into security I think about the fact that Ubisoft spent $1M on a
| backup solution that didn't work for the game that would have had
| the best use of it.
| 
| The missing point here is thst ubisoft is/was spending money for
| something outside of its domain of expertise, and managed to make
| a suboptimal decision. Amazon however is spending money on two of
| its core domains of expertise: building and managing datacenters
| and building and operating web services.
| 
| Not to mention, aws is very clear and explicit about what is
| their responsibility and what's your responsibility (security of
| the cloud vs security in the cloud).
| 
| Sad to see such a nice post ending like that.
 
| daneel_w wrote:
| The implied notion that the manager really had no idea what they
| actually wanted, or at the very least were unable to sensibly
| describe the requirements, is entirely believable, but from a
| systems development perspective nothing in this article makes any
| sense.
 
| binarymax wrote:
| Not sure if it's just me but I get an invalid SSL cert warning
| and can't load the page (DDG mobile browser)
 
  | Aachen wrote:
  | Works for me on a random old android browser (that wraps around
  | standard webview afaik), using Android 10 or 11 not sure
 
  | jborean93 wrote:
  | I get the same on Firefox on Linux (Fedora 37). It looks like
  | the server is responding with an ECDHE key exchange using a
  | SHA1 signature algorithm which is disabled on modern versions
  | of OpenSSL. I'm not sure why it works on Chrome, maybe their
  | TLS client is a bit more lax. You can see openssl fail to
  | verify the signature locally with `openssl s_client -connect
  | blog.dijit.sh:443` due to the wrong signature type.
  | 
  | At least for me on Fedora, I believe Firefox uses the system
  | policies and Fedora has set policies to block SHA1 signature
  | algorithms https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/StrongCryptoS
  | ettings2....
 
  | sbierwagen wrote:
  | What version of Android?
  | 
  | Qualys shows a bunch of errors and an incorrect cert chain but
  | it does manage to get a working connection on almost all test
  | browsers:
  | https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.dijit.sh...
 
  | zem wrote:
  | their manager paid for a valid SSL cert that they never used!
 
| techsurfer wrote:
| Where I work we have a 10K a year server budget but used to just
| use free Heroku instance
 
  | labster wrote:
  | Yeah, but this article is about keeping backups, and Heroku
  | deletes data from paying customers without notifying them
  | first.
 
| unixhero wrote:
| I would have done the same
 
| neves wrote:
| Didn't read, but I have a life insurance that I never used :-)
 
  | jldugger wrote:
  | Well, then you missed the story. It's more like a life
  | insurance policy that kills you when you turn 67, and pays out
  | when you turn ninety.
 
  | Etheryte wrote:
  | Have you considered that there may be more to a four-page essay
  | than a short title can convey?
 
    | version_five wrote:
    | While theoretically true, it's so often not the case that I'm
    | not surprised people just use the headline to infer what the
    | article explains.
 
      | vorpalhex wrote:
      | It may be wiser to stop reading, plug your ears with wax,
      | and hide in your room until death takes you.
      | 
      | If you can't read for pleasure on the site you are reading
      | for pleasure, something is wrong.
 
| [deleted]
 
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-02 23:00 UTC)