Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "ThePrimeTime" channel.

  1. "Do we hire ten engineers to check on the ten engineers that do the work?" YES! That's the whole point. It's McKinsey, a CONSULTANCY company. They sell hours. They've got just the right people to do that for you. So that if you fuck up and everything falls apart you can say "Hey, I could not possibly have done more, I even hired McKinsey to get to the bottom of this gridlocked mess. We need new developers." This is good for job rotation, folks. If we don't leave because we hate the toxicity someone will fire us based on pure science.
    2
  2. Advocating, in general, for dropping things like polymorphism in favor of speed and casually mentioning things like L1 cache and SIMD instructions is sheer pedantic nonsense from (probably young) people who just read something and want to play smart with it. SOLID principles apply to the structure of your code and are hardly ever in the critical path. The heavy lifting, if there is any, will be on the method implementation level at which none of the abstraction applies.
    1
  3. Scrum is OK for stable products in the maintenance phase. For anything dynamic it is destructive. In most places I have been working that adopted some form of Scrum, it was taken as a replacement for any kind of technical direction or ownership. No one owned anything, everyone was just implementing his own little issue of the day. Obviously with the well deserved results and motivation level of developers.
    1
  4. I somewhat agree but believe the main issue is ignored. That is lack of direction. All the places I worked did not have a real owner/designer/lead who oversaw and controlled the whole thing. After an initial setup it's like all pick an issue and good luck, get help if you need it. That will deteriorate real quickly. All different styles, technologies, visions if any, and no one has the power to enforce anything or prevent anything from being added. In software development, having some procedures in place is not going to cut it. When it comes down to collective responsibility you already lost. So it spirals down and someone comes up with the idea that we need more testing. More unit tests, more integration tests, more testers. And thus the mess gets institutionalised and change or fixes are made impossible. It doesn't matter that much though because by now no one left is motivated or capable to change anything for the better anyhow.
    1
  5. I am browsing jobs right now and just encountered one that asks for experience with an array of deployment technologies and products. This tells me a lot. If you read the ads for TerraForm/K8s and such they tell you it is supposed to automate deployment and make it easier and more robust. If that were true, why do I see so many vacancies for people who are supposed to manage this? Regular CI/CD is never a sole requirement, this is something that developers do on the side, spend a couple of days on and then hardly ever look at it again. This IoC rage seems to be turning into an industry of itself. It's a good story: Centrally control everything! Imagine the power! 🤣
    1