I'm at 15 years and have seen my share of "mickeymouse bullshit". Fixing that is the job, both the systems and the underlying human systems that brought it about. It's really easy for stuff to slip through. I find myself being more empathetic over time, not less.
Agree. Outside of the fancy pants FANGetc architects who have promo'd to the point of only work on bleeding edge new stuff, we all have to fix the last person's stuff. That is the job.
Putting this in context might be useful. OP writes:
> Company said “their site was slow” and they didn’t know why. Turns out they had two database clusters: one for production and one for research. The research cluster had 8 instances costing $5,000 per month total. The production cluster had 2 instances costing $500 per month total. The research cluster hadn’t been used in two years. The non-technical company owners had just accepted their system was slow for the past couple years without ever looking into possible fixes because, once again, “the cloud means we never have to manage anything. only agile story point product features matter.”
I'm not sure why we should try to apologize for or further normalize this level of negligence/incompetence? Of course things slip if you're tracking the wrong metrics, and if your approach to cost-management ignores huge actual waste while you make the problem worse by doubling down on hiring newbies, bloating do-nothing middle management or product at the expense of engineering, over-working what seniors you decide to keep, etc.
Fixing honest mistakes is, of course, part of the job. Fixing other people's negligence/incompetence/indifference should not be part of the job, nor compensating for other people's greed when they fail to think through their race-to-the-bottom well enough.
And if shoveling shit actually is the job, then just interview for that. If we're interviewing for 10-20 years of experience and a CS degree, that creates an expectation that the work that needs to be done has some relation to those criteria.
That "level of incompetence" is pretty much everywhere in society if you look around. Most of it you don't notice because its not your specialty and things mostly work anyway. Find any specialist in any field and they'll rant at you for hours about how broken X is.
It's surprisingly easy for this to happen even with competent people in charge. Again, fixing it is the job and why you're paid well.
>That "level of incompetence" is pretty much everywhere in society if you look around. Most of it you don't notice because its not your specialty and things mostly work anyway. Find any specialist in any field and they'll rant at you for hours about how broken X is.
This is something I've realized more and more as I've grown older. In my opinion, this stuff to 'clean up' it just more opportunities for someone like me.
Try telling yourself this story when the door blows off your airplane.
Engineering excellence doesn't happen by accident, and for anyone that works in any kind of technical field I'd expect a higher level of interest and/or pride than this kind of luke-warm "oh well, what did you expect". That attitude isn't a neutral stance, it's part of the problem.
> It's surprisingly easy for this to happen even with competent people in charge.
Exactly what management at Boeing is saying to regulators and the public while they cut corners on engineering, wreck a company that was around before they were alive, and fail-upwards with golden parachutes.
I'm not suggesting you need to lose sleep over every decline in quality everywhere, but your casual stance that cleaning up other people's messes is your whole job description is very likely a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you're normalizing this then people that do like quality have to fight that much harder for it.
In my experience the people like the OP lead to the opposite of engineering excellence. Engineering is a team sport. Engineering excellence requires teams of people working together. It requires identifying gaps, understanding how they came to be, and building systems to make sure they stay fixed. It requires understanding that humans and systems built by humans are fallible and applying checks and automation as needed.
Or you can just be the guy that yells that everyone else is doing it wrong and then wonder why you don't get hired
