Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nuerow 1692 days ago
> Where does "these are really good points, but why don't we have tooling which sets everything up automatically?" fit on the scale?

My guess it fits nowhere because the L5s don't have the ability to automate it, and the L6s think it's trivial and as it's done sparingly then it doesn't justify the work to do things differently.

And this is why we can't have nice things.
2 comments
azornathogron 1692 days ago
And yet it's been a decade since this video and practically everything it mentions is a non-problem now.

No one is spinning up new borgmon instances. Spanner is replicated by default. Only very low level services need to care about PCRs. If you use one of the approved frameworks it will set up practically all the production configuration for you. Basic alerting for your service is automated, just turn it on, picking cells to run in is automated, scaling your service is automated, etc.

Actually getting quota remains a problem... :-p

Anyway I would argue we can and do have nice things, and that has happened precisely through the efforts of a huge number of people at all levels.

Edit to add: of course, there are always new problems to complain about! It's the march of progress after all.

link
compiler-guy 1692 days ago
Yes. If someone were to make this video today, it wouldn't be about production jobs and PCRs, it would be about privacy reviews and branding approvals.

But the quota issues haven't changed a bit.

link
ikiris 1692 days ago
More like you aren't going to get promoted for automating someone else's toil. Also, now who's going to support it, better deprecate it since the library changed / got deprecated / it's tuesday.
link
Jensson 1691 days ago
> More like you aren't going to get promoted for automating someone else's toil.

Lots of people were promoted for automating these things. They built easy to use services, got extra headcount since they became important and climbed the ranks. So not sure why you'd think that.

It may be different at other companies, but at Google building stuff that many other engineers depends on is a major way to get promoted. Of course if you automate something and nobody uses your automation tooling then you wont get promoted, but if your work gets used by basically every new engineer you'll climb the ranks quickly.

link