I’ve had this same thought, although less well-articulated:

AI is supposedly going to obviate the need for white collar workers, and the best all the CEOs can come up with is the exact current status quo minus the white collar workers?

Embedded software development.

After 18 years of business and web application development, I want to intentionally seek out work that is constrained by physical reality.

Me: “Why are we switching from NoNameCMS to Salesforce?”

Savvy Manager: “NoNameCMS often won’t take our support calls, but if Salesforce goes down it’s in the WSJ the next day.”

This ignores the case when BigVendor is down for your account and your account only and support is mia, which is not that uncommon ime

It doesn’t ignore that case, it simply allows them to shift blame whereas the no name vendor does not.

So in the end it's not better for the users at all, it's just for non-technical people to shift blame. Great "business reasoning".

Nobody in this thread ever claimed it was better for the users. It's better for the people involved in the decision.

Yes, you are correct. But actually, I am not claiming someone claimed it :) I am actually trying to get at the idea, that the "business people" usually bring up, that they are looking after the user's/customer's interest and that others don't have the "business mind", while actually when it comes to this kind of decision making, all of that is out of the window, because they want to shift the blame.

A few steps further stepped back, most of the services we use are not that essential, that we cannot bear them being down a couple of hours over the course of a year. We have seen that over and over again with Cloudflare and AWS outages. The world continues to revolve. If we were a bit more reasonable with our expectations and realistic when it comes to required uptime guarantees, there wouldn't be much worry about something being down every now and then, and we wouldn't need to worry about our livelihood, if we need to reboot a customer's database server once a year, or their impression about the quality of system we built, if such a thing happens.

But even that is unlikely, if we set up things properly. I have worked in a company where we self-hosted our platform and it didn't have the most complex fail-safe setup ever. Just have good backups and make sure you can restore, and 95% of the worries go away, for such non-essential products, and outages were less often than trouble with AWS or Cloudflare.

It seems that either way, you need people who know what they are doing, whether you self-host or buy some service.

And this speaks to the lack of alignment about what's good for the decision makers Vs what's good for the customer.

It's not tho, they have workers that they pay not making money, all while footing bigger bill for the "pleasure"

That's more a small business owner perspective. For a middle manager rattling some cages during a week of IBM downtime is adequate performance while it is unclear how much performative response is necessary if mom&pops is down for a day.

You have to consider the class of problems as a whole, from the perspective of management:

- The cheap solution would be equally good, and it's just a blame shifting game.

- The cheap solution is worse, and paying more for the name brand gets you more reliability.

There are many situations that fall into the second category, and anyone running a business probably has personal memories of making the second mistake. The problem is, if you're not up to speed on the nitty gritty technical details of a tradeoff, you can't tell the difference between the first category and the second. So you accept that sometimes you will over-spend for "no reason" as a cost of doing business. (But the reason is that information and trust don't come for free.)

This excuse only works for one or maybe two such outages in most orgs

> non-technical people

It's also better for the technical people. If you self host the DB goes down at 2am on a Sunday morning all the technical people are gonna get woken up and they will be working on it until it's fixed.

If us-east goes down a technical person will be woken up, they'll check downdetector.com, and they'll say "us-east is down, nothin' we can do" and go back to sleep.

"Nobody has ever been fired for buying IBM"

JFrog, is that you?

Just wait until you end up spending $100,000 for an awful implantation from a partner who pretends to understand your business need but delivers something that doesn’t work.

But perhaps I’m bitter from prior Salesforce experiences.

I like to think of “warning” as something to alert on statistically, e.g. incorrect password attempt rate jumps from 0.4% of login attempts to 99%.

This sounds more like metrics than a log statement.

For me logs should complement metrics, and can in many instances be replaced by tracing if the spans are annotated sufficiently. But making metrics out of logs is both costly and a bit brittle.

This point is important - the value of a log is inextricably tied to its unlikelihood. Which depends on so many things in the context.

The value of all logs is tied only to if there is a problem will it help you find and debug it. If you never do statistics that password log is useless. If you never encounter a problem where the log helps debug it was useless.

God doesn't tell you the future so good luck figuring out which logs you really need.

LLMann amnesia?

“Americas doesn’t correct problems - we over-correct.”

Bill Maher

related: "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."

The difference between the ratio of people returning their carts at Wal-mart vs at the Natural Foods store where I live is substantial.

Grass might hold the cart in place, but most abandoned carts get dropped off in places where the wind can catch them and blow them into cars.

Fair point.

I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.

Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.

Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).

I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.

EF hits you in the face right at the start with the massive convenience that it provides. And then the paper cuts start adding up, and adding up, and adding up.

Although the EF team has made huge progress towards keeping your entities persistence-unaware, it's still not enough and eventually you wind up building your project in Entity Framework just as much as in C#.

What papercuts?

Being forced to compromise your domain model. Yes the product has improved this greatly in recent years but it’s still inadequate IMO.

Fluent syntax can at first seem like the product has achieved persistence ignorance nirvana but then you have to compromise a little here, compromise a little there, until some point, if you’re still thinking critically about the design, you realize that you’re writing your app in Entity Framework as much as you are writing it in C#, as I mentioned.

Passing around a large mutable blob (dbcontext) which, if not managed with the utmost discipline by your dev team, can make it necessary to understand what large swaths of the code do before you can adequately understand what any small part of the code does.

“SITUATION: There are 15 competing standards.”