Back in 2000, I had an in-person interview at a very small b2b website. They'd been using overseas contractors (zero local technical people) and the founder/interviewer barely knew a thing about computers. He didn't know how to run a technical interview, so he sat me down at a computer, logged in as root on prod (lol the only server), and pointed me at a couple of bugs. I knocked them out lickety-split and was hired on the spot. The world sure has changed
I'm making it like that again. I'm back down with the blue collar proles in Mountain View, landscaping and moving and waiting tables and the like. That's how things work outside of speculation... employer has a business where they get paid, and they outsource their own functions. I'll never run an engineering org like Silicon Valley again, it's so broken in delivering results as a result of the speculative nature. I have a project website up serving two cities. We use Clojure and static generation, and operate and maintain IT like an old tractor. I train my replacements to keep myself available and customers getting a good price (minimum wage). It lets people start their career with hands-on work. It's in BigTech's interest to make us think tech is hard, but I'm using most of the same stuff as I did when I was 14 and self-taught 20 years ago, and it's gotten far far simpler and better.
I'm in high tech and dying. This is making me feel nostalgic and thinking... maybe taking 3 steps back would be 10 steps forward in terms of my mental health.
Every company I see "really would like" to fully automate their build/test/deploy pipeline, to actually have automated tests for most new features, infra as code is a work in progress, et c. Basically most of the Joel-test or modern HN-bubble best practices are still on the wishlist or on a perpetual "we're trying to make that happen" an awful lot of places.
And they are all, all, "fixing their Jira workflows". Constantly. What a time-sink of a tool, as commonly used. I'm convinced at this point they'd be better off letting their dev teams use whatever, and just have human-driven processes for collecting all the (mostly meaningless) metrics they always seem to need to report upward, rather than trying to make one tool do everything automatically. Pretty sure Jira and other heavy PM tools are typically the sort of software/process that Graeber calls out in Bullshit Jobs: adding a ton of work out of proportion with any real benefit, to make everything fit in a computer and on a spreadsheet, rather than reducing work.
