I can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it.
But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it.
As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest.
Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.
Actually most engineers would complain about the slides shown here. The issue is not the technicality or depth of the content but on the way it is presented and shown. I'm
it depends, I noticed that many engineers will input information on a slide following their thought process closely, they rarely think about the audience's perspective, especially if the audience is less technical or not familiar with the domain.
Sure mate, because taking a messy list of confusing statements and turning it into something like: "High risk of failure on re-entry - foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data - test data unfit to support decision as flight condition is significantly outside of test database" requires a PhD in Materials Science.
If you can't effectively communicate how the results (or lack of results) of your research will impact the outcome of a high-stakes space mission you have no business being in that room from the start.
Cloud providers will always make their in-house offerings more attractive and easier to use compared to other (open standards) solutions. That's how you get locked in.
I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.
> hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there.
Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
Here is another experiment - reach out to he security team, and tell them AWS costs are too high, ask them which providers they will be ready and willing to sign off. My guess is it will not be a big list beyond AWS/Azure/GCP.
So the market is not competitive at all, most of us cannot switch providers even if the alternative would be 100x better.
PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.
> PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.
> Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
???
So what does this have to do with the security team at all? There is no "barrier" in that sense.
In the past we've had more non-cloud engineers than cloud. Using your experiment, if you told your IT team you wanted to move to the cloud (back then) to save a million dollars - do you think they'd sign off on it? No.
Who signed off on it? The bosses that believed in the "hype".
Who's in control and who has power? If the bosses want it to happen it will even if it doesn't make sense. They have the ability to fire the security team if they said no. Just like how ethical AI teams get fired...
The barrier is those in power still believe in the "hype" and don't know otherwise.
I met a CTO of a startup sometime ago that moved their entire operations from GCP to AWS because they were "more familiar with it". That's all.
> I met a CTO of a startup sometime ago that moved their entire operations from GCP to AWS because they were "more familiar with it". That's all.
Without knowing which startup you are referring to its hard to make a judgement as to the quality of the decision but you should not discount the role tooling familiarity has when developing software.
> but you should not discount the role tooling familiarity has when developing software.
No 1 was familiar with the cloud when it 1st came out.
As to this scenario, clearly the whole company was running GCP so everyone minus the new CTO would be familiar with GCP vs something else.
Point exactly being that regardless of the security team or the developers - this familiarity that you mention or any other trait only applies to a select few in management.
> Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
SOCS/PCI/etc is going to take maybe $100-200k. If you can save a million dollars you should do it. Hire an expert if you have to. Serious.
I think it probably won't save you a million dollars, because I think all of the cloud vendors are priced with just enough profit to make sure of it, but if you know something I'd like to know about it.
Speaking as someone who went through this process at a large financial firm, you're off by at least an order of magnitude. You need a SOC1 audit of each product you plan to use, which is likely quite a few if you want to take full advantage. The big players should eventually be able to offer that for free once they've been through the process but, at least relatively recently, it was only true today if your cloud budget was tend of millions. That aside, you'll still need an audit of your usage of the cloud (i.e. how you deploy to it and handle movement of data back and forth). That'll always be on your dime.
No. At the end of the day, the customer pays, because I charge more for bullshit. They need an SOC to use my cloud product it cost me 150k USD to get an audit from a big-four for a single site in 2016. Maybe it’s a little more today, but it’s not an order-of-magnitude.
I’m assuming you already adhere to the relevant standards. Obviously if you’re cutting corners getting up to snuff is going to cost a lot more than a hundy.
A Big 4 can't conduct a proper SOC audit without access to the cloud providers internal controls/processes. That's the problematic/expensive part since it requires a bunch of time from the cloud provider, which they will also likely want to bill for.
As someone currently dealing with SOC in preparation for the company I work for going public, I will also confirm it is a giant bean-counting pain in the butt.
> I think all of the cloud vendors are priced with just enough profit to make sure of it
Profit margins on cloud computing are insanely high (at least, relative to my expectations). They basically have no interest in anything with less than a 15% margin, even at the massive scale they operate at. Certain products have triple-digit margins. Even if they are the minority, I don't think we can give them a pass with claims of "just enough profit".
The reality is that there’s myriad providers that simply do not provide the assurances that AWS/Azure/GCP do. Sure, there’s a bit of “use these, because we know them, and they work”, but there’s also a bit of “the typical developer is not at all across the security requirements, especially taking into account contractural obligations and regulated industries”.
tl;dr even after getting a big public sector contract, a UK based cloud provider was killed off after scaling to meet demand which was then withdrawn. Attaining - and keeping - scale is extremely difficult. And that was just IaaS provision.
If you're scaling your whole business for one customer based on one contract then you better be sure you can either scale down again, or the contract has safeguards in it to stop a rugpull.
The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.
If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.
I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.
> The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up
I see this spouted a lot, but my recent (last 6 months?) experience with AWS is that unless I pay up front to reserve a tonne of high end instances that I don’t necessarily need today, but might need tomorrow, I’m regularly running into capacity issues where I cannot spin up new instances of the metal that I want, and AWS support confirms they just don’t have the capacity unless we pay to reserve it up front.
At that point, it’s no different to running my own DC, where I already have 3 months of runway on my server pipeline anyway.
I wonder what the cause of that is? I think I've heard this sentiment elsewhere recently but I don't recall it in the past. So what's caused the capacity constraint?
The risk to Amazon of enabling you to scale up low end instances on demand is relatively low.
The risk of doing the same with high end instances is a different story.
Low risk & high margin products make for a highly profitable business. High risk and lower margin products less so.
Their target audience is people that can be equally well served by digital ocean and their ilk, but are happy to pay the Amazon premium.
It’s a good business model for Amazon, and a terrible value proposition for the customer who may not know better, and thinks they’re paying to de-risk their potential future growth requirements. The cost of migrating out then becomes prohibitive (both in technical hours and egress fees), so you like it or lump it, but either way, you likely just wait and/or pay Amazon more.
Same. I use Hetzner and DigitalOcean for my own stuff, and shudder at AWS costs. At the same time both my current and previous employers use AWS and it's fine for their user because revenue is (very) high relative to the cloud resource usage, and that is a situation where cloud usage is fine. But so many - B2C in particular - businesses who uses cloud have tight enough margins that they're just setting themselves up for being disrupted by a competitor with tighter cost control.
Do people even understand what "free market" means? A free market is one with low or no barriers to entry for suppliers and perfect information available to consumers such that they can always make the optimal choice. How can anyone, especially on this site, think the cloud market is anywhere close to being free?
I think people are confused thinking free market means no regulation. No regulation leads to monopoly which is the furthest from a free market you can possibly get. People who seriously advocate for such things are ignorant fools. There are countless examples of how markets fail and that's why every major economy in the world has a government.
It depends on what you mean by free market, it's often used interchangeably with with laissez-faire capitalism but an important concept in a free market is that the barrier to entry for new competitors should be as low as realistically possible, so regulation that prevents vendor lock-in can be pro free market.
It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?).
Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition.
> no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
If you owned part of the company you worked for, you would be more likely to provide good service as that would then have repeat business and would directly financially impact you. The performance of the business is the only way you would get paid and as there are no shareholders the company would compensate rather than dividend.
Your comment makes absolutely no sense, socialism doesn't prevent free markets.
Socialism is about social not state ownership of the means of production. This does not prevent the state being involved either, and even then they can be a joint-stock corporation's.
As I said, "social" ownership of the means of production can occur in a capitalist country with free markets.
A socialist regime, like the USSR, North Korea, or Mao's China would have state ownership. The founding fathers of modern socialist thought (e.g. Marx) would define socialism in terms of state ownership of the means of production.
But feel free to muddy the waters if you prefer to avoid concrete definitions.
I don't think Google is afraid LLMs will "fix" all its issues. I think they're more afraid that their seemingly unassailable moat is suddenly exposed to disruption.
People use search engines to find answers to questions. If ChatGPT can give an answer faster and in a more natural format then people will flock to it. Most won't care that the quality of the response is as low or lower than what a search engine returns.
The people getting paid salaries to have a bird's eye view and veto power over those kinds of changes that could screw with my deliverable should be the ones knowledgeable and accountable for that estimate
But they are accountable to their stakeholders (clients, upper management, etc). They take your estimate and many others from other people in the team and work those into a delivery plan.
A good manager will know how to manage risks and remove blockers in a way that gives a developer the best chance to work within the estimate. A bad manager will usually have no plan and put all the blame on the developers if things go awry.
Agile frameworks often remove the developer as much as possible from the time estimation effort, instead relying on past performance, and attempting instead to have the developer focus on breaking work up evenly.
I expect a plumber to give me an estimate of time and cost for his "tasks" before starting work. Even if he doesn't tell me the exact cost upfront he'll still be able to tell me roughly if he'll be done in 2-3 hours or less/more.
If I have a big project and I'm dealing with a plumbing company I might not be talking directly to the plumbers but to their manager. The manager will usually ask for time/complexity estimates from his plumbers before sending me a quote. The manager will usually factor into the quote any risks plus the company's profit margin.
There's a lot of talk about agile, scrum, no-estimates and so on, but a big part of the software industry still works with time estimates and budgets communicated up front.
This is the correct understanding. Management is pitting labor and the customers against each other with this system, for the purpose of screwing them both. The correct answer is to tip zero and leave a comment to the effect of "You need to pay your employees more, not pass that responsibility to me." Employees may not be thrilled with this but it will direct at least part of their ire toward management. Putting as much pressure on management from as many parties as possible is the only solution.
But the question is now: What is an appropriate amount?
Is it the amount that was appropriate for generations, i.e., in a full-service restaurant, 10% for mediocre service, 15% for excellent service, and 20% for truly outstanding service? Or is it the 20/25/30% scale, or the 20/30/40% scale I've seen at a lunch counter, where previous appropriate was nothing or if they had a tip jar, toss a couple bucks? It's an open question, and a screwed-up interaction either way.
Agree, but, if we have to acknowledge it while it is still the norm, how will the norm ever change states? The ongoing acknowledgement and practice of it will continue it perpetually.
How to break the cycle? Comments alone will not work. Put yourself in the chair of a sociopathic corp executive. From that seat, they're still getting maximum profits, still paying the employees the minimum, the suckers\\\customers still pay the outrageous tips so the employees aren't rebelling or quitting, and the comments are mere noise (if they are ever even read at that level).
As much as it sucks for the workers short term, it seems that the only way to effect change is to universally reject the bogus tipping 'culture' superimposed on us by the corporate overlords, which sucks for the workers. It has to suck so bad for the workers that they universally quit. Only then will the executives see any problem and the need to adjust their policies on pay, pricing, and tipping.
I don't like to make things suck for workers either, so if you see another way, please let us know!
Theoretically this may be true, but it's not how it will play out in practice. A few people will not tip in protest, the staff will think they're jerks (which they arguably are), and nothing will change.
If you're looking for an easy magic happy way to enact social change where everyone likes you at every step of the way, you'll be looking for a long time.
All you can really do is raise a stink and encourage others to do the same. Fortunately, it takes fewer complaints than you might think to get even a large business to pay attention.
If we don't want businesses to passive aggressively pass their labor costs to their customers, here's a plausible course of events.
1) Angry customers, encouraging each other over social media, start tipping zero and writing angry comments about why. (A sibling commenter's idea to underscore in your comment that you're going to take your business elsewhere because of the policy is excellent.) Because of the people who refuse to tip, angry employees also start making noise, sometimes to the customer, but just as often to to their manager because the manager is there every day. Now everyone's angry, the negativity is spreading, awareness is being created.
2) A news outlet picks up on the trend because news loves everything negative. They trump it up and claim it's an epidemic across the nation of Americans rejecting tipping culture because greedy corporations took it too far. It's now in the news cycle and it's a real PR issue for some corps.
3) A clever corp that likes to make a big deal about treating their employees right realizes that their policy of passing off labor costs to the customer is generating more bad PR than it's worth. They realize they can generate GOOD PR for themselves by changing this policy. Maybe some smaller business owner is gutsy enough to use this trend to actually pay their employees a living wage and stop asking for tips altogether. That gets headlines, generates more attention for the trend, and helps them get more customers.
4) The revolution is in full swing at this point, because the issue has entered the public consciousness and at least some businesses have changed their ways under pressure. Does tipping culture get abolished nationwide and replaced with businesses actually paying people what they're worth? Probably not, but it becomes harder for businesses to pass their labor costs to customers via the deceptive practice of tip inflation. The world is improved because people were angry and unreasonable.
If you think about it this process happens all over the place within our society. It doesn't take 100% of the people shouting to compel action. Outcomes are a function of the number of people who shout multiplied by how loudly they shout. So yeah customers are well within their tights to tip zero and be explicit about why. Because it won't just be the customers shouting at that point, it will make labor shout too. It is an unreasonable action but the willingness of someone to be unreasonable is frequently what change depends on.
But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it.
As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest.
Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.