| This other quote seem horrific as well. > A single specialist in Java distributed systems is managing the entire configuration without any commercial storage tools or help from engineers specializing in storage, SAN, or backup. So this person is either a genius who has specialized knowledge in these areas, or it's been abstracted by the platforms people to the point where it's only Java knowledge. Either way, it sounds like this person never gets to take a vacation or be not on-call. Hopefully there's not just 1 person responsible for all of the configuration, it just takes 1 person to run it. > Process prevents problems. At many companies, the standard response to something going wrong is to add a preventative step to the relevant procedure. The linked section goes on to talk about HR process with the "Act in NetFlix's best interest". It totally avoids the concept of technical processes. I'm betting "best interest" is a bit more formal on the tech side. Bad process is process for process's sake. Good process serves a very important role for offloading what people have to remember, as well as knowledge transfer. From time to time, steps of a process become irrelevant because of other changes and it has to be pruned. Sometimes companies forget about this step. If Netflix has ever seen a problem with their builds/deploys and added a test to check against that problem, guess what--they followed the standard response to update the procedure. It's not necessarily a bad thing. |