There are places that offer Copilot to any team that wants it, and then behind the scenes they informed their managers that if the team (1+ persons) adopts it they will have to shed 10%+ human capacity (lose a person, move a person, fire a person) in the upcoming quarters next year.
I've been working with Java for the last decade and for the past 5Y used the latest LTS versions in a very regulated environment (we have very strict patch deadlines for most CVEs). Rarely we hit issues with migrating to different versions of our dependencies. The most painful one was a small API change in Spring that revealed that we were doing something very bad so it took me 1-2D in between meetings to investigate. It is true though that every few weeks we are hit by a new CVE and we have to patch a lib version, but TBH this is what I expect from a language that has so many eyes on it's ecosystem.
It's never that simple. There is a strong herd mentality in the business space.
Just yesterday I've been in a presentation from the risk department and they described the motives around choosing a specific security product as `safe choice, because a lot of other companies use it in our space, so regulator can't complain`...the whole decision structure boiled down to: `I don't want to do extra work to check the other options, we go with whatever the herd chooses`. Its terrifying to hear this...
The whole point of software like this is a regulatory box-ticking exercise, no-one wants it to actually do anything except satisfy the regulator. Crowdstrike had less overhead and (until now) outages than its competitors, and the regulators were willing to tick the box, so of course people picked them. There are bad cases of people following the herd where there are other solutions with actually better functionality, but this isn't that.
OTOH... I remember an O365 outage in London a few years ago.
You're down? Great, so are your competitors, your customers, and your suppliers. Head to the pub. Actually, you'll probably get more real value there, as your competitors, customers and suppliers are at that same pub. Insurance multinationals have been founded from less.
That didn't affect any OT though, so it was more just proof that 90% of work carried out via O365 adds no real value. Knowing where the planes are probably is important.
> You're down? Great, so are your competitors, your customers, and your suppliers. Head to the pub. Actually, you'll probably get more real value there, as your competitors, customers and suppliers are at that same pub. Insurance multinationals have been founded from less.
I mean yeah, that's the other thing - the Keynesian sound banker aspect. But that's more for software that you're intentionally using for your business processes. I don't think anyone was thinking about Cloudstrike being down in the first place, unless they were worried about an outage in the webpage that lists all the security certifications they have.
You say that as it's some bad thing, but it's just other words for "use boring tech".
Yes, there could be reasons to choose a lesser-known product, but they better be really good reasons.
Because there are multiple general reasons in the other direction, and incidents like this are actually one of those reasons: they could happen with any product, but now you have a bigger community sharing heads-ups and workarounds, and vendor's incident response might also be better when the whole world is on fire, not only a couple of companies.
This week I went to the office (not Amazon, another company in Europe) for 3 days in a row because we had new-joiners and I wanted to make it easier for them in the beginning. I live near the office, just a 15m walk away, and I would still not like to continue 3D/W. I know, people call it entitlement, but my problem is that the office is a hostile environment. Here is my experience, in an office that was at most 30% capacity, in a 3Y old building:
- The "kitchen" area is so tiny, if you want water you will queue, there are only 2 places on the whole floor where you can get it and they are tiny rooms where at max 5 ppl could enter, 3 comfortably.
- Queues at the bathroom, there are 2 stalls, for the whole floor, I couldn't find another one (I really hope there is one more, I just failed to find it, I did ask, nobody knew about another one). This got worse and worse as the week progressed. I've noticed a similar issue at my previous employer (5Y old building, part of why I left, health issues that are greatly improved by the access to a toilet)
- They implemented some eco-friendly lights, with movement sensors. This sounds great and I am for helping the environment, the problem is that in practice these lights turn on-off every few minutes, during the day, in summer, in a sunlight filled building. My eyes were so tired every EOD.
- In the same eco-friendly manner they made the AC not run during the night and morning. So, if you respected the work schedule and came to the office in the morning it was hotter than outside. It's summer, we had 30C in the morning, 47C in the afternoon. I needed to wait for 1-2h for the AC to kick in and recover after arriving in the office.
I am conflicted, I did see that the new-joiners liked the in-person meetings and all, and I do get it. It is easier for non-experienced people to talk to new colleagues online if they have some interactions before. But, time after time, as my employers change buildings I see always reductions in common areas/bathrooms/etc. I find it hilarious now that I have to research the building of potential employers and ask them if they plan to move out in the next 1-3Y (more and more jobs no longer offer remote work in my area).
A long long time ago, I initiated a project to move 80% of the SaaS company's workload out of a big cloud provider that is fond of 3 day in office work weeks into privately run data center cages. To be clear, we bought and ran the computers, rented the network and the cages/rooms in the data center buildings/campuses.
One of our grading criteria was how many bathroom stalls and urinals they had in the men's and women's bathrooms.
Some of these places had 200k sqft (20k m^2) and just 1 stall. No bueno!!!
When we were evaluatin the sites/locations (in the early days) we had to queue our 8 folks up for 5-20 min for bathroom breaks before we could go to lunch!
A few years back, after I left my old employer I went on the local IT subreddit to find a question from somebody about another company from the same building. First comment was that he should accept the offer if he is open to go to the toilet in the Starbucks/McDonalds across the road. I felt vindicated :))
Every day in that building people would queue before and after lunch at the toilets. We are not speaking about a no-name company, it is one of the biggest financial software vendors in the world. Funnily enough, the old building, where they had fewer people, had x2 toilets. They moved us to a more dense floor with half the toilets.
Your chief complaints (eco friendly everything in new construction, AC restrictions) are likely due to compliance with local laws. I would suggest to choose wisely when electing your political leaders. In fact California has a requirement for half the cubicle outlets in new offices to be on timers that shut off during "non-working" hours.
Where I live this was mostly a voluntary thing. I do not have a problem with it happening, I have a problem with the implementation. The lights thing is just nonsensical. Having them completely off during the day would have been better on both counts, but nobody thought about it.
Apparently you are not the pro in term of limited restrooms stall. You need to “floor jumping”: the art of using the stair either up or down a few levels until a free one is avail.
We did that! Sometimes I would sprint across the stairs 1-2 floors to go to the bathroom. The problem was that just to reach another stall you had to go through x4 security doors that were quite hard to open so it took quite a bit of time. Something that should have taken max 5m now was taking 15m, and my bladder was quite unhappy. Also, due to this, all breaks got elongated, as we were waiting for colleagues before going to lunch (for example) to go to the bathroom, and we were also waiting during meetings for them to arrive from the bathroom.
Then you might have the same problem there so you end up "toilet hunting" (if you're lucky and your company has multiple floors) which is mind bogglingly time inefficient.
I might have a bit of insight here. I work in a bank that has a lot of history. In practice, the IT infra is never truly merged (it takes 10+ years to migrate some components), not the functional components at least. There are bridges to connect some things so that reporting is deemed acceptable for the central bank/regulators.
If you come to one of the big banks and just look at the technical components, you can delineate the history of each merger/acquisition from that, going back 30-50 years.
A thing that shocked me: a lot of systems have a weird nationalistic twist to them (at least the old ones), so if you work in non-US, you will see systems that do not speak english in their API, but french, dutch, german, etc. all in the same bank. This is...problematic, especially since they usually use weird text encoding and not something like UTF-8.
Fun story about the 3-4Y window, one of the execs at my company was having a Q&A, and he gave an example in another question a new set of components, saying that he expects them to be in use for the next 20Y. I asked why does he think he can keep the know-how and outsmart the competition (components were part of algo trading and other trading related things) for the next 20y with just this investment, and he just downplayed my question as an IT guy wanting more money/work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similar for me, I noticed that the thing that lead to burnout was the politics around work, not the work itself. I changed companies and was happy till I got myself in the same political nightmare. If you find yourself in the same position, change the project/company, it will make a big difference for a while. Try to find a company with a healthy management/culture for a long term fix (if you want to spend more than 2-3y in one place), this is very hard thing to come by.
I just assume there is no healthy management culture anywhere for American companies, especially not with MBAs continually poisoning the well. It’s finding what you can tolerate and still maintain your self worth and sanity.
Regulatory changes in banks kept accelerating in the last 50Y and I see no reason this will stop. It is harder and harder for them to keep up. Reasons for this are:
* Banks still have very old codebases and changing anything is fear inducing for everyone (automated testing is a new things for a lot of teams)
* Banks control very little of their core software. They have a lot of vendors for the same thing. You will see multiple vendors delivering basically the same thing in different parts of the bank, and at the same time multiple versions of those vendor applications in diferent parts of the bank. Integrating this is a nightmare (it can take more than 1Y to move a tag in a XML).
* IT is still mostly used for marketing purposes in banks, it's not a way of doing things. The design/integration is mostly discussed/designed by functional people. They are great, but it does happen that they don't see the full implications of their choices till it is too late. Also, because this is a design 'from above' changing anything takes a lot longer. For any change you have to convince a lot more people till you get to the actual person that will have to do it.
* A lot more complicated management reasons. Nobody wants to take a hit on a new IT project, and few people have the IT & banking knowledge to move such a project (why would you? they pay is average). You cannot progress with just one of them. Places where these projects happen is mostly close to pricing/trading as those are seen as profit centers and the bank is more willing to fail a few times till it can build something decent. As you get closer to the guts of the bank things get more and more...problematic.
Edit:
I had to add this. Central banks are also bad at IT, they do not set an example worth following. I consider this the main reason why all our interactions with banks are less than ideal online.
I keep hearing about these magical systems that work like clockwork, but I also work in a bank and the reality is very different. In a void, yes, those systems are amazing. Now add all the other systems that have to be linked with that and things start to turn into a nightmarish situation. All the new systems have to be contorted, twisted and designed in weird ways to accommodate the old ones. Everything works a bit worse just because there are a minority of systems that don't know UTF-8 for example, or can't send more than 16 bytes in a field. Banks are very bad at IT. If you don't work in the trading part of it you are seen as a necessary evil. These systems are still with us because banks are very risk averse and because decommissioning a system in a bank can take decades.
If you think banks old software is bad, just wait till you see their newer stuff. The JSP I see dumped out there is just terrifying in many cases... and that's after security and code review.
I am looking into buying stuff from them, I would also love some feedback. I just wants simple pants that fit, this seems to be a difficult requirement to fulfil.
