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Whether you realize it or not, you believe in the Scapegoat Effect, and it's going to get you into a shitload of trouble some day. Customers don't care if it's you're fault or not, they only care that your stuff is broken. That safety blanket of having a vendor to blame for the problem might feel like it'll protect your job but the fact is that there are many points in your career where there is one customer we can't afford to lose for financial or political reasons, and if your lack of pessimistic thinking loses us that customer, then you're boned. You might not be fired, but you'll be at the top of the list for a layoff round (and if the loss was financial, that'll happen). In IT, we pay someone else to clean our offices and restock supplies because it's not part of our core business. It's fine to let that go. If I work at a hotel or a restaurant, though, 'we' have our own people that clean the buildings and equipment. Because a hotel is a clean, dry building that people rent in increments of 24 hours. Similarly, a restaurant has to build up a core competency in cleanliness or the health department will shut them down. If we violate that social contract, we take it in the teeth, and then people legislate away our opportunities to cut those corners. For the life of me I can't figure out why IT companies are running to AWS. This is the exact same sort of facilities management problem that physical businesses deal with internally. I have saved myself and my teams from a few architectural blunders by asking the head of IT or Operations what they think of my solution. Sometimes the answer starts with, "nobody would ever deploy a solution that looked like that". Better to get that feedback in private rather than in a post-mortem or via veto in a launch meeting. But I have had less and less access to that sort of domain knowledge over the last decade, between Cloud Services and centralized, faceless IT at some bigger companies. It's a huge loss of wisdom, and I don't know that the consequences are entirely outweighed by the advantages. |