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by weehoo 1885 days ago
If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling provides business value, you can do something that requires zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end of it be promoted for organizing a successful migration despite delivering zero measurable business value. The effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest of the business so you can just claim the tooling was the leverage that let the people doing first order work succeed. Being a tool astronaut lets you claim a portion of everyone else in your orgs success without ever taking a professional risk, since your odds of being called out for an ineffectual change are near zero, since there’s no first order signals.

I’m not saying modern tooling is useless; I don’t use ed, cc, and make for my development. But there’s a huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort. The first one requires figuring out all the implicit/implied/manual parts of the process. The second one is often just turning one set of configuration languages into another.
2 comments
mclightning 1885 days ago
Holy cow. This! Exactly this! It happened in big corp., I am working at right now. As an engineer, I just watched it happen. When I tried to explain to other engineers, most didn't get it. Only a few got the trajectory we were put in by higher ups for credits they were aiming to get. But those few were onboard or powerless as me.

We just observed it happen. As the engineers, we did our job best we could regardless. Things broke, we fixed. Somethings rolled back, and even for those they claimed credit & celebrated for re-inventing the wheel.

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goodpoint 1885 days ago
> huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort

Spot on. There's a serious point of diminishing returns when piling up tools.

At some point the cost of learning, adapting, deploying, maintaining yet another tool becomes a net negative.

Often the solution is to replace 5 fancy tools with 100 lines of Python and Bash.

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