I'm clearly jaded by my own experience but I feel that there's less and less focus on building and retaining a solid team. People are treated like cogs on a machine and this shape their view of the system in return.

It's actually quite awful to work in such an environment.

Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Although you're correct that it would be too soon to prophesize their death, I want to clarify that Lindy ensures correlation, not causation.

"Count your meetings"

Wouldn't hurt to try!

Recently I was complaining to a friend that this does not work like this any more. 10 years ago, yes but at least in my experience the personal touch seems to have lost value.

I to still do blog because it's good to write. Who knows, someone might benefit from it.

Once this type of issue gets publicized, does that in anyway affect the certification?

Sometimes scandals affect these things. But it's hard to predict.

Deep work that's important but does not appear shiny carries an elevated risk of being completely messed up by someone.

"Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not need a team of six."

Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing everything that stood on it's stability.

Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma.

Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?"

Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"

Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance.

It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:

Note the projects that use that software, also note metrics like API calls received, failure recoveries, uptime, etc and put that in a promo packet

Thanks, I genuinely appreciate the advice!

May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]

Gather metrics and regularly report them.

> When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.

Interesting observation. I have personally tried to avoid getting into people manager positions (as I believed I'd be Peter Principled) but always took it as my duty to share knowledge and mentor the curious and the hungry (and even the ones that are not so). It's actually a very rewarding feeling when I hear good things about people who learned with me.

I have a question for anyone who knows.

When the productivity fell in covid days due to communications overheads and people just suddenly finding it easy to execute "lazy", did the ever so efficient corporate machinery pick this up in a jiffy and propose salary cuts to match? Or were they just too nice to do that?

It didn't fall. Productivity went up after the initial scramble.

Trifold looks simple! Also seems like a good reason to finally try out bunny.net

For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/

I host this with GCP and stay within free tier

And how I deploy a similar thing with GCS/Cloud build etc is covered here https://chanux.me/blog/post/automate-static-site-publishing-...

> For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/

This seems... incredibly complex when you could just use S3 + Cloudflare.

I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further.

However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.

Not saying you should change it if it's working, and I don't have a ready-made tutorial, but assuming you only need to serve static files I would:

  (1) upload the files to an S3 bucket (GCS or Cloudflare R2 may also work, haven't tried);
  (2) point Cloudflare at the bucket via their Cloud Connector;
  (3) turn on Cloudflare Access.

Gemini CLI, Antigravity and Jules.

It's going Googly well I see!