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Depends, do you want to give an honest answer? Do you have a stake in your employer succeeding?

Donald Trump has shown that as long as you shake down the money rather than go through Congress to get it, the President has tax and spend powers. The presidency is really a mafia don seat.

Haul in all the VCs and tech CEOs and charge them a "donation."


GL can absolutely do this already.

All the reporting I have read suggests that they are roping anyone and everyone they can into doing redactions. So I suspect many simply lack the experience to do it well.

Ok, so say someone says "We're overloaded, we need more people" so someone else says "Ok, department Q, R and T changes priority to doing redaction" then at least one person somewhere in this chain has to at least consider that every person from Q, R and T must go through at least a 3 slide powerpoint or whatever saying what's happening, this is what to do, this is what to not do, right?

Lol you’re assuming anyone in the management chain believes there’s any nuance or thought to the task beyond the superficial. I can assure you that lots of managers lack the humility to appreciate how little they might actually know.

It depends on which administration you support if the redactions have been completed in good faith.

They should all have been using the same redaction tooling.

If I were to hazard a guess, pure speculation, I would say the unretrievable parts were court / previously redacted and the retrievable parts are the latest round of panicked rushed redactions.


They are for the same reason. How do customers react to either? If us-east-1 fails, nobody complains. If Microsoft uses a browser to render components on Windows and eats all of your RAM, nobody complains.

Oh, people complain. The companies responsible have just gotten to the point where they are so entrenched that they don't need to care at all about customer complaints.

The value now is not really money from customers, but a company's share price or valuation. That, together with the hard push for subscriptions from every single app and service, devaluated customer experience and feedback. Because not many will go through the hell of unsubscribing process even after the outage or serious issues like private data stolen.

There's just not much motivation left to do better systems.


It all sticks with the 'monopoly' scent.

This to me was the real lesson of the outage. A us-east-1 outage is treated like bad weather. A regional outage can be blamed on the dev. us-east-1 is too big to get blamed, which is why it should be the region of choice for an employee.

Bizarre way of making decisions.

us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”


It's about risk profile. The question isn't "which region goes down the least" but "how often will I be blamed for an outage."

If you never get blamed for a US east outage, that's better than us-east-2 if that could get you blamed 0.5% of the time when it goes down and us1 isn't down or etc


But ise1 is down 4x more than use2 (AWS closely guards the numbers and won’t release them, but that is what I’ve seen from 3rd party analysis). Don’t you want your customers to say, “wow, half the internet was down today but XYZ service was up with no issues! I love them.”

I can’t tell if it’s you thinking this way, or if your company is setup to incentivize this. But either way, I think it’s suboptimal.

That’s not about “risk profile” of the business or making the right decision for the customer, that’s about risk profile of saving your own tail in the organizational gamesmanship sense. Which is a shame, tbh. For both the customer and for people making tech decisions.

I fully appreciate that some companies may encourage this behavior, and we all need a job so we have to work somewhere, but this type of thinking objectively leads to worse technology decisions and I hope I never have to work for a company that encourages this.

Edit: addressing blame when things go wrong… don’t you think it would be a better story to tell your boss that you did the right thing for the customer, rather than “I did this because everyone else does it, even though most of us agree it’s worse for the customer in general”. I would assume I’d get more blame for the 2nd decision than the 1st.


> Don’t you want your customers to say, “wow, half the internet was down today but XYZ service was up with no issues! I love them.”

See any companies getting credit for it in the last AWS outage? I didn't. My employers didn't reward vendors who stayed up during it.


We got credit for it.

Shame about your employer, though.


If my cloud provider goes down and my site is offline, my customers and my boss will be upset with me and demand I fix it as fast as possible. They will not care what caused it.

If my cloud provider goes down and also takes down Spotify, Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, and a ton of other major services that my customers and my boss use daily, they will be much more understanding that there is a third party issue that we can more or less wait out.

Every provider has outages. US-east-2 will sometimes go down. If I'm not going to make a system that can fail over from one provider to another (which is a lot of work and can be expensive, and really won't be actively used often), it might be better to just use the popular one and go with the group.


us-east-2 goes down far, far less frequently than us-east-1. AWS doesn’t publicly release the outage numbers (they hold them very close to the chest) but some people have compiled the stats on their own if you poke around.

The regions provide the same functionality, so I see genuinely no downside or additional work to picking the 2 regions over the 2 regions.

It seems like one of those no brainer decisions to me. I take pride in being up when everyone else is down. 5 9s or bust, baby!


I also don’t understand this.

US-East-2 staying up isn’t my responsibility. If I need my own failover, I’m going to select a different region anyway.

And it’s not like US-East-2 isn’t already huge and growing. It’s effectively becoming another US-East-1.


> US-East-2 staying up isn’t my responsibility.

No, but you can be blamed if other things are up and yours is not. If everyone's stuff is down, it is just a natural disaster.


Why aren't you using IBM cloud?

If IBM still had a good reputation, I probably would.

I’ve seen people go with IBM Cloud because their salespeople were willing to discount more heavily than AWS/GCP/Azure were. Tier 2 players can be hungrier for your business than tier 1 are. And here I’m talking about completely mainstream workloads (Linux, K8S, etc)

Separately from that, if you are trying to move certain types of non-mainstream IBM workloads to cloud (AIX, IBM i, z/OS) then IBM is tier 1 in that case


Or, people will just pay.

Gerry Tan's X feed makes it pretty clear where YC is politically aligned nowadays.


Code review is an unfunded mandate. It is something the company demands while not really doing anything make sure people get rewarded for doing it.

> while not really doing anything make sure people get rewarded for doing it.

I don’t know about you, but I get paychecks twice a month for doing things included in my job description.


My manager asked me to disable CI and gating code owner reviews “for 2 weeks” 6 months ago so people could commit faster. Just because it is in your job description doesn’t mean it won’t get shoved aside when it’s perceived as the bottleneck for the core mission.

Now we have nightly builds that nobody checks the result of and we’re finding out about bugs weeks later. Big company btw


That's his right. In capitalism, company owners have the power (which they delegate to managers) to fuck up the company as much as they see fit. On the upside, it means it's their responsibility and not yours.

Once you've said it's going to cause horrible problems, and they say do it anyway, and you have a paper trail of this and it's backed up onto your own storage medium, then you just do it and bring popcorn. If you think it'll bankrupt the company, then you have nothing to lose since you have no right to stop a company going bankrupt, so you might as well email your manager's manager's manager first and see if your manager gets fired.


Yep, who cares. You put your 2 cent in and if the business leaders see otherwise, that's their problem. You get paid on a schedule, if the app crashes and burns because the leaders demanded to remove PR reviews, that's not your problem.

Too often I see developers getting personally invested in business outcomes which they don't have a stake in. Getting frustrated when they don't have the final say.


It can be your problem if the company goes under and you lose your job: you might not be able to pay your mortgage or bills.

If you believe your manager is asking for unreasonable things in what you are an expert in despite you raising these concerns, and it's not clear their manager is in on it, please raise it to their manager!

"I am willing to continue working this way, but I just want to make sure the consequences it could have on the business are clear to everyone here."


One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem.

I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.


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