“People don’t buy software, they hire a service” is a bullshit straw man.

That OS on your laptop? Software. The terminal your SSH runs in? Software. The browser you’re reading this take in? Software. The editor you wrote your last 10k LOC in? Software.

The only “service” I buy is email — and even that I run myself. It’s still just software, plus ops.

Yes, running things is hard. Nobody serious disputes that. But pretending this is some new revelation is ahistorical. We used to call this systems engineering, operations, reliability, or just doing your job before SRE needed a brand deck.

And let’s be clear about the direction of value:

Software without SRE still has value. SRE without software has none.

A binary I can run, copy, fork, and understand beats a perfectly monitored nothing. A CLI tool with zero uptime guarantees still solves problems. A library still ships value. A game still runs. A compiler still compiles.

Ops exists to serve software, not replace it. Reliability amplifies value — it does not create it.

If “writing code is easy,” why is the world drowning in unreliable, unmaintainable, over-engineered trash with immaculate dashboards and flawless incident postmortems?

People buy software. They appreciate service when the software becomes infrastructure. Confusing the two is how you end up worshipping uptime graphs while shipping nothing worth running.

Good start.

Now do it for three months. Every year.

Been doing that for 25 years now, and the only regret I have is that I should have started earlier.

Can you share some details? Do you disconnect while in your hometown going about your daily routine, or do you have this down time in a different environment? I'm kind of looking for inspiration. I have grown kids and friends that I text with so I'm also wondering how my relationship with them would fit into this. Has that played a role for you?

Meanwhile the industry standard definition since the 80s:

- Junior - someone who can work under guidance.

- Regular - someone who can work alone.

- Senior - someone who can guide others.

I do wonder how seniors manage cultural / technical differences. If the junior is not responsive to guidance, advices, hints .. what else do you do

If juniors ignore guidance and advice, they stay in junior roles, handling simpler, less impactful tasks.

Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.

It’s perfectly fine to remain a mid-level engineer for your entire career if it makes you happy; it’s solid, honest work that contributes meaningfully. Plenty of people in their 60s have held the same job for decades, and that’s okay; it can be a path to genuine satisfaction.

A junior or "mid" who doesn't take guidance repeatedly should likely be managed out.

It's perfectly fine remain "mid" (not junior IMHO) but is not ok to ignore guidance and advice from more experienced team members.

I don't want career growth, rather homeostasis. That is, growth that matches the rate of decay.

At most, maybe something like "tissue remodelling" to be lean, clean and flexible, so to speak, but not "big".

Some people that are immune to listen to people with more experience will continue to be ”junior” forever. They may eventually not have the title junior, but they really are.

> Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.

That's why I'm not a big fan of recommending people to often and quickly change jobs to increase titles and pay. Their skills don't level up the same way, and they end up with a title of senior/lead developer and can't actually build maintainable systems or solve problems that nobody tells them the solution to.

Agree.

If one is unable to work alone but manages to join a new company with an inflated title, people will notice. They're gonna have to keep job-hopping until they find a place that doesn't notice the bad performance anymore.

This is demonstrable by the amount of CVs with "12 jobs in the last 6 years" in my reject pile.

We have been here before. Same reason why CV driven development is a thing. When you look for a job, if you are a junior or a mid dev for too long, recruiters will think something is wrong with you. The idea of being happy remaining at your current level is anathema in an industry where chasing the next new thing whether it is a JS framework or a new title is an axiom.

And what if no junior under a certain senior ever makes it past junior?

Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

Hinging senior evaluations on junior promotions directly fuels the title inflation I’m decrying. Desperate to show “impact through development,” seniors (or managers) push for premature title bumps; turning fresh juniors into “mids” or “seniors” without the skills to match, just to hit metrics.

This is rampant in tech, where inflated titles compensate for everything from low pay to talent wars, eroding expertise and making hiring a nightmare.

We end up with a system that prioritises optics over substance, where growth takes a backseat to checkbox promotions. It’s frustrating and counterproductive.

Mentorship should inspire organic development, not force-fed ladders that collapse under their own weight!

Instead, let’s measure seniors holistically, decoupling from junior title escalations to allow people to excel at their level indefinitely. Alternatives include:

* Technical Proficiency and Individual Contributions: Use code reviews, technical assessments, or metrics like deployment frequency and bug resolution rates to gauge a senior’s direct impact, without needing to “graduate” juniors.

This focuses on their own output and problem-solving prowess.

* Knowledge Sharing and Enablement: Track things like workshops led, documentation created, or peer feedback on guidance quality via 360 reviews—emphasising team uplift without mandatory promotions. * Project Outcomes and Efficiency: Evaluate based on team velocity improvements, innovation (e.g., patents or architectural wins), or overall delivery success, rewarding systemic contributions over individual mentee milestones. These methods honour diverse career paths, letting juniors stay put if it suits them while still valuing (and evaluating) senior leadership.

Agreed, a direct metric of “promotion rate” is obviously flawed. I posed it more as a rhetorical question for reflection- at the limit, it’s clear that people with mentoring responsibilities should be accountable somehow for being good mentors. Terrible mentors who undermine, sabotage, or consistently fail their mentees definitely exist.

A lot of the comments are complaining about how this metric is a terrible way to evaluate seniors but I'd disagree. If one junior can't grow then it's a problem for that junior. If no juniors can grow then it's a problem for the senior - either they don't have good mentoring skills OR they need to work on improving the hiring pipeline for their team (either raising the bar in interviews/changing what skills you're evaluating for in interviews/working with recruiters to fix the pre-interview filters).

In either case it's an ambiguous problem that needs to be solved and just throwing your hands up and saying that you don't want to be evaluated for that is not going to help.

> Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

Sounds like the same kind of mistake as evaluating teachers by the grades of their students. Soon people figure out the "one weird trick" how to get the highest score easily.

People perform to your metrics. If you don’t want people to be one trick ponies, you’d better have more than one metric.

I've never worked at a place like that, and I hope I never do. Although, I've never even heard of any reasonable person putting that into practice either, so I'm probably safe.

There's a difference between questions of cultural / technical difference and questions of competence or character.

In the end, if a junior is repeatedly not responding to appropriate guidance or advice, then that junior should be gone from that position. Same for a senior who is repeatedly dispensing inappropriate guidance or advice.

But it requires careful analysis of the situation before such a drastic course of action: is there a communication problem, a training problem, a mistake in evaluating abilities?

A senior should be able to navigate cultural and technical differences competently. A junior should understand that that the ones with responsibility for a project also have the authority to make decisions about the project, which should be honored.

talk to their manager. If their manager doesn't respond you go to your manager or the manager's manager.

The problem could also be with the senior.....

let them fail and see if they change affect

Yes but there is also a temporal component as well. A Senior should be able to do all their tasks and whatever else comes their way without needing guidance. To be able to do that requires a certain level of time in position.

nah, the tasks evolve as you get older. having a senior do all their tasks and whatever else without guidance sounds like free work. even the old people in the old folk's home get an assistant to help them take their pills!

That's a good functional definition. Verbs beat nouns for this kind of thing.

... because the government is in the pocket of the big hotel chains, which are ruining the country.

Airbnb: World travelers who try to blend in. Hotel: Drunk Brits who puke all over the place.

We have 3 Airbnb flats in our house for 2 years now. Never had an issue with any of the renters; But, the lights in the stairwell are working now, the door locks work, electricity is stable, and I haven't seen a cockroach in a long time.

Meanwhile the guests from the hotel across the street keep us awake every freakin' night.

Bonus: Those 3 flats had been sitting empty for nearly 10 years, just like the other ~30 thousand flats sitting empty in the city.

My anecdata is different: the Airbnb one floor above us in our last place earned us a visit from the cops (due to a misunderstanding about the definition of "bottom floor") due to how frequently they were occupied by people either having parties there or coming back from parties very loudly at all times of night.

The same floor/direction misunderstanding also got us so many incorrect doorbell rings that we ended up muting it at the cost of risking missed deliveries.

Whatever magical behavior these AirBnB guests have, they can still take it to a hotel.

10 years of solving a problem that didn't exist, and creating a few dozen new ones in the process.

Not evening mentioning the massive security risk they pose; Well, I did now.

That might explain the onslaught of instagram engineer CVs in my Inbox.

I just want an option to opt-out of that flaming broken pile of spam fire that RCS is.

Sadly that ban also hit three of our our games that help victims cope with trauma. :(

Please write to your representative:

Dear [Representative's Name],

I am writing to formally request an investigation into the activities of Collective Shout, an organization whose censorship-driven campaigns have caused measurable harm to artists, survivors, and vulnerable communities. Under the guise of protecting women and children, they have erased trauma narratives, suppressed creative expression, and bullied platforms into enacting broad, opaque bans. Their actions disproportionately affect marginalized voices and bypass democratic discourse in favor of ideological policing. There is growing concern that their influence is rooted more in religious moralism than evidence-based advocacy. I urge your office to examine their funding, methods, and societal impact with urgency and transparency.

Sincerely, [Your Full Name] [Your Address / Constituency]

This is useless. You can't stop Collective Shout (their campaign almost surely falls under First Amendment rights), and even if you could, 30 minutes later a new group pops up. Plus your message would fall completely on deaf ears for anyone who agrees with Collective Shout.

Bring attention to the fact that payment processors are acting as active censorship of legal content, rather than neutral infrastructure. Emphasize that if they can censor legal content, anything could be next, including but not limited to political donations of a specific party.

Collective Shout is a foreign organization attacking American companies. The First Amendment does not mean you get to speak and advocate in secret, and it only applies to American residents.

Not quite. The First Amendment applies to everyone within U.S. jurisdiction, not just residents or citizens.

The first, third, fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments have all been historically used to establish various rights of privacy.

That's not to say that one agrees with or disagrees with the outcome here, just that this argument isn't based in an understanding of the law.

The first amendment doesn't "apply" the people, domestic or otherwise, at all. It applies to the government, and what it can't do.

Thanks. So the steelman version is, the first amendment applies to the government when they restrict rights of residents, not just citizens.

While they also deserve some backlash, I would focus on bringing attention to the payment processors.

Uh, Visa/Mastercard chose to do that. We're talking about payment processors who process trillions of dollars every year. They won't just bend Steam over backwards to make an Australian NGO happy.

It's either that Visa/Mastercard always want to censor porn, or they're pressured by government(s) to do so.

I think it may be that they don't care about porn, but will performatively censor it sometimes in order to forestall actual government legislative action.