> When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious > amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my > day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software > engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I > am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have > these days
Yes he has many good, useful and interesting points. The fact that his life has changed and can no longer dedicate the same amount of time, effort and energy as he could when he was a student with fewer responsibilities is the key non-sensationalist takeaway imo.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I > literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a > few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small > number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
You really think this strawman would make a statistical difference when compared with the sheer amount of participation tamper-evident mail-in voting would achieve?
Weigh it against "I have one day to vote, gotta take some unpaid time off work.. now gotta find my polling station.. different every year.. oh look it's 21 miles away.. wait they say they're out of ballots.. hmm, now they say there's a hyphen in my name in their DB that doesn't match my ID" type bs many states have to deal with.
The "problem" with mail in voting is it's not absolutely perfect. It is, however, the best option we have to have the highest possible turnout of eligible voters under the current systems. Which is why it's so strongly pushed back against in highly gerrymandered states.
It's just basic human behavior. If you want people to participate, you make it as easy as possible. Tamper evident mail-in with paper trails just also happen to be the most secure method we currently have.
"Through June 2018, the Special Counsel has publicly initiated criminal proceedings against 20 peopleâ"five U.S. nationals, 14 Russian nationals, and one Dutch nationalâ"and three Russian organizations."
This is just Russia, not even his other illegal doings like stuff Cohen is under investigation for. Quite the nothingburger.
"They haven't proved anything about Trump!"
No, just a bunch of his associates, including several directly involved with his administration and election campaign. I guess they all acted independently & committed crimes for teh lulz. If you believe the ultimate boss of a bunch of criminals isn't involved then you need your common sense meter checked.
So tired of the "nothing has been found" false narrative. Many indictments have come down. There are so many moving pieces, and it's such a sensitive investigation, if it had wrapped up by now it'd mean Mueller was subverted ala House investigation. "No one showed up, no one answered our questions, the WH was in direct communication with interviewees. However based on available data we can say there was absolutely no collusion"
Pretty easy to come to that conclusion when your investigation is a farce.
Yeah. I saw someone comment asking how the WH was going to spin this. Simple, they don't have to. A couple "I'll get back to you on that" from Sanders and the next nutty thing will have caused everyone to forget.
It's nearly impossible to remember all the totally nutso things that have happened. Part of a strategy, one would imagine.
ZTE repeatedly violated the US sanctions against Iran, and lied to the government while in remediation. Now that the US has broken it's international agreement w/Iran & is threatening sanctions against our global partners who were also part of the agreement, the only logical 5d chess move is to get ZTE back in the business of selling security-compromised devices to Americans. Using the Dept of Commerce, paid for by American tax dollars.
I would be shocked if this was a backroom quid pro quo deal with China to expand the Trump brand business interests. Shocked I say.
This. Set a federal law that is actually drafted by anti-NN folks, masquerade as pro-NN, most states will defer without contest and the whole circlejerk is complete.
"We wanted to do a blockchain technology-related ETF, so not another bitcoin fund but something that takes advantage of the underlying ecosystem. So we developed a methodology in-house which measures seven quantitative factors and we run those factors on a universe of publicly traded [data]."
I trust them, they have quantified a universe after all.
So getting all your email isn't a concern but getting a few minor additional bits of information is? Anyway you can just use their authenticator and print off emergency-use codes, no need to give them additional info.
Run your own mail server if you're that concerned, it's not very difficult. You could even do it in aws quite cheaply; they will setup reverse DNS for a static (elastic) IP if you fill out a form.
If that is too insecure, I suggest writing encrypted letters to folks and making sure they have a decryption pad. One time use, of course.
Assuming they're a good company with people you like, you can be nice about it while doing the best thing for yourself.
Don't mention it until you're ready to walk. When you are ready, give something reasonable like a month. Make it clear you're willing to extend that period out if they desire, if they make it worth your while. A guaranteed bonus for staying longer, maybe some guaranteed minimum commit contract hours to help with transition training or something.
You don't owe any employer anything and you've put in your time. If you're ready to walk away don't let your good nature allow people to take advantage of you.
Employees being single points of failure is a business risk issue. It's up to the company to mitigate that risk, not the employees. Our obligation ends at staying professional; keeping documentation current, cross training when required etc.
Lineage builds are starting to roll out. Once there's some builds for my device I'll cut over. I've never had any problems.
Stock on my device is terrible cuz Verizon. I just rooted and removed the bloatware, but they clearly were never going to fully patch even stagefright, so went with CM as I did with most of my devices.
Dear proprietary, bloated malware attack vector from hell; foad. No one wants you. Your parents hate you. Your girlfriend became a lesbian after seeing you naked. You are a stinking pustule, a soon to be forgotten constant annoyance with your privacy violations, supercookies, security flaws and general worthlessness. Please take Adobe with you.
You can sync files back over or they will actually ship you a HD with your data; if you return the drive you get a refund of the drive cost but you're also free to keep it.
The cost for individual file reads is reasonable too.
I agree 100%, but the fanboy "must have the newest version for prestige" types don't care. In fact, the more exclusionary the better for them. Totally absurd.
Those sorts of low-powered laptops are already incredibly cheap and nearly disposable, so why would I want one that requires my phone?
What's going to happen Soon(tm) is your phone will be able to do a decent display projection + keyboard. The whole any-surface desktop idea. + multitouch. Then we'll be talkin'
Right now I'm just looking at getting a cheap chromebook that converts to a table and running android apps on it. Really only useful for me when traveling, so not a high priority.
Everyone who knows anything knows that the community is the value. Get everyone on the internet, value is automatically created.
The only problem is 1 of those billions of people would probably share a song illegally on a p2p network and would owe 75 trillion dollars, leaving us like 68 trillion in the red.
I'd like to know too. I only use windows for gaming at this point but I've not updated my gaming rig since they started with all the invasive pointless tracking crap.
I'd rather just run without updates than wade through the mess of BS that is their updates to figure out what is actually going to be applied.
It's a good point but following some sort of vaguely sensible process and best practices (as nebulous as that can be) doesn't cost any money. Like, it doesn't cost any money to create role based accounts for service/license management, bring up systems in a clean repeatable way, implement monitoring etc. Most of my career has been around open source software which is free licensing fee-wise. I think you need qualified engineers regardless if it's OSS or not so the argument of "we need vendor support!" never really flies for me, outside of hardware which does fail.
The purchasing stuff I agree is a big minefield. I think the best we can do as engineers is give them the whole picture. Present the options, the risks, and let them choose. Be as clear as possible and get them sign off on the risks if they choose crappy solutions to save money. Then you can hold them accountable when stuff melts down the way you said it would. If you're lucky, over time you can develop a reasonable working relationship with the business side of the house and there can be mutual trust. Makes life much easier. It's easy to see certain groups as "the enemy" (I'm certainly guilty, depending on which hat I'm wearing on that particular day) but the truth is Hanlon's Razor is a real thing and most people want to at least do a reasonably decent job. Most of the real problems are people related not technology. Sometimes a simple "hey, we're going back and forth on this a lot; I don't fully understand where you're coming from. Want to grab a coffee and you can explain it?" goes a long way.. vs "they're dumb/bad/the enemy and I will 'win' this battle". Hell, they might even be bad but you still gotta find some way to work it out; massive hostility doesn't make for enjoyable workplaces or lives - considering how much time is spent working.
> How does that sort of shit even happen? Who the hell promoted this person? Why?
A lot of the problem is the business side almost always knows nothing about the tech side or (bigger problem) who to trust and who is full of it. They're generally the sorts who can barely keep their own workstation under control. So you run into a few problems.
1) There's a shortage of qualified tech people who have been around long enough to avoid some of the common problems 2) The people ultimately responsible for hiring and business continuity don't know the difference between a good techie and someone who just fabricated most of their resume 3) Incompetent people tend to prefer to hire other incompetent people 4) Qualified people with experience can usually sniff out the hellholes during the interview process and GTFO
Specific to this company, they had extremely weak management. They had a profitable product that required very little actual engineering.. it was a mobile service but the app actually was self contained on the handset.. the only reason they hit our webservice was for billing and account related activities.
They hired the clown via contract from a consulting company to be their Windows/IT guy. Then their service was expanded to multiple carriers and they needed a real datacenter; because this guy was already there, they asked him if he had the ability to build out the DC. So suddenly this low tier windows guy has an opportunity to be an ops/infrastructure manager and add all sorts of fun stuff to his resume; he jumped on it. None of the people had any grownup level ops experience to evaluate his skillset or vet his plans/ideas.
After they had the DB meltdown I mentioned earlier they realized they needed a real ops person. The startup I was at was dying and a friend I worked with before (a business analyst SQL person) suggested me. They also wanted to put their product in teh clowdz; this was 2008-2009, the startup I was at was a pretty early AWS pioneer. (Pre-EBS, pre-ELB.. it was the wild west!).
Anyway I got in and it was a mess, I fought to help them clean stuff up and to avoid problems before they happened. The devs appreciated my efforts but due to the aforementioned weak management, the monkey dude was actually technically a manager? and I was just an engineer? Or something. So while technically I was "in charge" of production he still kept his claws in enough that he'd fight with me over every decision. I finally gave up and got a new gig when it became clear the situation wasn't going to change. Basically it came down to - I'm used to cleaning up peoples messes but I'm not going to fight for the right to clean up other peoples messes.
Ironically when I put in notice they actually offered to fire that dude on the spot if I'd stay. That made me doubly sure I made the right decision to leave; you should never put an employee in that situation to make that kinda choice. He was let go ~ 3 months later after they hired a replacement for me (they actually paid me contract to interview people for them). They're still around (and profitable!) despite themselves; most of the original people are gone due to a series of acquisitions.
Anyway I have a bunch of stories.. I've been doing internet startups for the last 18ish years. I like some aspects of them but sometimes I go park at a big company for a while to recharge. Maybe someday I'll write a book. I actually collect some of the funnier/more absurd stuff that goes on at the various companies. Mostly for my own personal amusement (and because other people wouldn't believe it otherwise). I anonymize them though.
A lot of the kids coming into syseng/devops/dev aren't necessarily bad, they just are inexperienced and have to learn the same lessons. That's the part that wears on me sometimes.. but if people are willing to take advice/mentoring from old timers(heh.. not even 40) then it's all good.
There has been a few times in my career I worked with lots of smart people (smarter than me) and it was a blast. Unfortunately that never seems to last all that long.
I guess. Lately I think the real difference between a seasoned engineer and a "senior" engineer is just taking that extra 10% of time to do things vaguely sensibly up front. There is no such thing as temporary. At the least, set things up so refactoring them later doesn't require a total redo.
This guy in particular was just in way over his head but one of those sorts who is paranoid about admitting that or asking for help. In fact he was hostile to help. Not really part of my original point but he'd do stuff like;
- ignored my advice to not tie production services into corporate domain (if you ever get sold/acquired etc, you understand) - ignored my advice to not create a "split domain" with the corporate domain (eg the windows domain was companyname.com, the windows dns servers thought they were SOAs but that same domain had actual internet resolvers with different records) - refused to entertain the notion that linux was production ready (this was in 2009) and forced solaris as a standard. On x86. As vmware VMs. - refused to take any help or assistance in installing the base OS despite being a windows guy with zero unix knowledge. We ended up with stuff like DB servers that had 2x swap as ram.. and they had 128G ram.. - For some odd reason was very hostile to the notion of service/host monitoring.. like.. not just against nagios but _anything_
The list goes on and on.
He was just really promoted way above his experience level as happens in startups; they hired me probably 8 months after him, when production databases had been wiped and backups hadn't been successful for months (back to the no monitoring thing).
It took a bunch of years to fully undo all the crap he had put in place. I danced a jig when I closed the lights on the datacenter he had built (we migrated). Did I mention in that datacenter, he setup "redundant" switches and firewalls for the servers.. but had all the internet drops coming down into one single unmanaged 1G cheapie netgear entry level switch?
If he had allowed me to help I bet he'd still be working there. I have no problems mentoring people as long as they're not asshats. Last I heard he was in law school after a stint in real estate..
Slashdot Mirror
> When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious
> amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my
> day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software
> engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I
> am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have
> these days
Yes he has many good, useful and interesting points. The fact that his life has changed and can no longer dedicate the same amount of time, effort and energy as he could when he was a student with fewer responsibilities is the key non-sensationalist takeaway imo.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a
> few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small
> number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Not the shite state of broadband internet in most regions of America.
Full 10g network at home, 10 down / 1 up with 8% packet loss.. how is fast home network helping.. most games don't push much traffic.
Here's to hoping Musk sat internet becomes a reality. Kessler Syndrome aside.
You really think this strawman would make a statistical difference when compared with the sheer amount of participation tamper-evident mail-in voting would achieve?
Weigh it against "I have one day to vote, gotta take some unpaid time off work.. now gotta find my polling station.. different every year.. oh look it's 21 miles away.. wait they say they're out of ballots.. hmm, now they say there's a hyphen in my name in their DB that doesn't match my ID" type bs many states have to deal with.
The "problem" with mail in voting is it's not absolutely perfect. It is, however, the best option we have to have the highest possible turnout of eligible voters under the current systems. Which is why it's so strongly pushed back against in highly gerrymandered states.
It's just basic human behavior. If you want people to participate, you make it as easy as possible. Tamper evident mail-in with paper trails just also happen to be the most secure method we currently have.
I got an email where the dude had the same address as mine except with an extra character their system musta not handled right.
I've been cutting down on meat consumption, it's not been easy. The misdirected email was a receipt from a rib joint;
> 10 x Cajun Boneless Wings
> 1 x Louisiana Rub Full Ribs
> 1 x Hickory Smoked BBQ Full Ribs
> 3 x Ranch
> 1 x Large Seasoned Fries
Talk about a sucker punch..
Nothing happened?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Through June 2018, the Special Counsel has publicly initiated criminal proceedings against 20 peopleâ"five U.S. nationals, 14 Russian nationals, and one Dutch nationalâ"and three Russian organizations."
This is just Russia, not even his other illegal doings like stuff Cohen is under investigation for. Quite the nothingburger.
"They haven't proved anything about Trump!"
No, just a bunch of his associates, including several directly involved with his administration and election campaign. I guess they all acted independently & committed crimes for teh lulz. If you believe the ultimate boss of a bunch of criminals isn't involved then you need your common sense meter checked.
So tired of the "nothing has been found" false narrative. Many indictments have come down. There are so many moving pieces, and it's such a sensitive investigation, if it had wrapped up by now it'd mean Mueller was subverted ala House investigation. "No one showed up, no one answered our questions, the WH was in direct communication with interviewees. However based on available data we can say there was absolutely no collusion"
Pretty easy to come to that conclusion when your investigation is a farce.
Yeah. I saw someone comment asking how the WH was going to spin this. Simple, they don't have to. A couple "I'll get back to you on that" from Sanders and the next nutty thing will have caused everyone to forget.
It's nearly impossible to remember all the totally nutso things that have happened. Part of a strategy, one would imagine.
ZTE repeatedly violated the US sanctions against Iran, and lied to the government while in remediation. Now that the US has broken it's international agreement w/Iran & is threatening sanctions against our global partners who were also part of the agreement, the only logical 5d chess move is to get ZTE back in the business of selling security-compromised devices to Americans. Using the Dept of Commerce, paid for by American tax dollars.
I would be shocked if this was a backroom quid pro quo deal with China to expand the Trump brand business interests. Shocked I say.
tl;dr Jobs Jobs Jobs!
Too heavy to transport. Don't get the practical application. Hopefully there is one though! Cool idea, reuse byproduct
This. Set a federal law that is actually drafted by anti-NN folks, masquerade as pro-NN, most states will defer without contest and the whole circlejerk is complete.
https://www.coindesk.com/the-f...
"We wanted to do a blockchain technology-related ETF, so not another bitcoin fund but something that takes advantage of the underlying ecosystem. So we developed a methodology in-house which measures seven quantitative factors and we run those factors on a universe of publicly traded [data]."
I trust them, they have quantified a universe after all.
So getting all your email isn't a concern but getting a few minor additional bits of information is? Anyway you can just use their authenticator and print off emergency-use codes, no need to give them additional info.
Run your own mail server if you're that concerned, it's not very difficult. You could even do it in aws quite cheaply; they will setup reverse DNS for a static (elastic) IP if you fill out a form.
If that is too insecure, I suggest writing encrypted letters to folks and making sure they have a decryption pad. One time use, of course.
All new crashes:
[ 22.462856] kernel BUG at /build/linux-J4_1pC/linux-4.4.0/mm/slub.c:3627!
[ 22.462874] invalid opcode: 0000 [#1] SMP
Yay for regressions.
Assuming they're a good company with people you like, you can be nice about it while doing the best thing for yourself.
Don't mention it until you're ready to walk. When you are ready, give something reasonable like a month. Make it clear you're willing to extend that period out if they desire, if they make it worth your while. A guaranteed bonus for staying longer, maybe some guaranteed minimum commit contract hours to help with transition training or something.
You don't owe any employer anything and you've put in your time. If you're ready to walk away don't let your good nature allow people to take advantage of you.
Employees being single points of failure is a business risk issue. It's up to the company to mitigate that risk, not the employees. Our obligation ends at staying professional; keeping documentation current, cross training when required etc.
"Doesn't affect me directly, screw everyone else!"
Love the attitude.
Lineage builds are starting to roll out. Once there's some builds for my device I'll cut over. I've never had any problems.
Stock on my device is terrible cuz Verizon. I just rooted and removed the bloatware, but they clearly were never going to fully patch even stagefright, so went with CM as I did with most of my devices.
Dear proprietary, bloated malware attack vector from hell; foad. No one wants you. Your parents hate you. Your girlfriend became a lesbian after seeing you naked. You are a stinking pustule, a soon to be forgotten constant annoyance with your privacy violations, supercookies, security flaws and general worthlessness. Please take Adobe with you.
I have none.
Also, I disable uPnP and its ilk on my firewall. I have a guest wifi router and keep scrubs off my network.
https://www.backblaze.com/clou...
$5/month unlimited data size (writes).
You can sync files back over or they will actually ship you a HD with your data; if you return the drive you get a refund of the drive cost but you're also free to keep it.
The cost for individual file reads is reasonable too.
No muss no fuss
I agree 100%, but the fanboy "must have the newest version for prestige" types don't care. In fact, the more exclusionary the better for them. Totally absurd.
Those sorts of low-powered laptops are already incredibly cheap and nearly disposable, so why would I want one that requires my phone?
What's going to happen Soon(tm) is your phone will be able to do a decent display projection + keyboard. The whole any-surface desktop idea. + multitouch. Then we'll be talkin'
Right now I'm just looking at getting a cheap chromebook that converts to a table and running android apps on it. Really only useful for me when traveling, so not a high priority.
Everyone who knows anything knows that the community is the value. Get everyone on the internet, value is automatically created.
The only problem is 1 of those billions of people would probably share a song illegally on a p2p network and would owe 75 trillion dollars, leaving us like 68 trillion in the red.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
I'd like to know too. I only use windows for gaming at this point but I've not updated my gaming rig since they started with all the invasive pointless tracking crap.
I'd rather just run without updates than wade through the mess of BS that is their updates to figure out what is actually going to be applied.
It's a good point but following some sort of vaguely sensible process and best practices (as nebulous as that can be) doesn't cost any money. Like, it doesn't cost any money to create role based accounts for service/license management, bring up systems in a clean repeatable way, implement monitoring etc. Most of my career has been around open source software which is free licensing fee-wise. I think you need qualified engineers regardless if it's OSS or not so the argument of "we need vendor support!" never really flies for me, outside of hardware which does fail.
The purchasing stuff I agree is a big minefield. I think the best we can do as engineers is give them the whole picture. Present the options, the risks, and let them choose. Be as clear as possible and get them sign off on the risks if they choose crappy solutions to save money. Then you can hold them accountable when stuff melts down the way you said it would. If you're lucky, over time you can develop a reasonable working relationship with the business side of the house and there can be mutual trust. Makes life much easier. It's easy to see certain groups as "the enemy" (I'm certainly guilty, depending on which hat I'm wearing on that particular day) but the truth is Hanlon's Razor is a real thing and most people want to at least do a reasonably decent job. Most of the real problems are people related not technology. Sometimes a simple "hey, we're going back and forth on this a lot; I don't fully understand where you're coming from. Want to grab a coffee and you can explain it?" goes a long way.. vs "they're dumb/bad/the enemy and I will 'win' this battle". Hell, they might even be bad but you still gotta find some way to work it out; massive hostility doesn't make for enjoyable workplaces or lives - considering how much time is spent working.
> How does that sort of shit even happen? Who the hell promoted this person? Why?
A lot of the problem is the business side almost always knows nothing about the tech side or (bigger problem) who to trust and who is full of it. They're generally the sorts who can barely keep their own workstation under control. So you run into a few problems.
1) There's a shortage of qualified tech people who have been around long enough to avoid some of the common problems
2) The people ultimately responsible for hiring and business continuity don't know the difference between a good techie and someone who just fabricated most of their resume
3) Incompetent people tend to prefer to hire other incompetent people
4) Qualified people with experience can usually sniff out the hellholes during the interview process and GTFO
Specific to this company, they had extremely weak management. They had a profitable product that required very little actual engineering.. it was a mobile service but the app actually was self contained on the handset.. the only reason they hit our webservice was for billing and account related activities.
They hired the clown via contract from a consulting company to be their Windows/IT guy. Then their service was expanded to multiple carriers and they needed a real datacenter; because this guy was already there, they asked him if he had the ability to build out the DC. So suddenly this low tier windows guy has an opportunity to be an ops/infrastructure manager and add all sorts of fun stuff to his resume; he jumped on it. None of the people had any grownup level ops experience to evaluate his skillset or vet his plans/ideas.
After they had the DB meltdown I mentioned earlier they realized they needed a real ops person. The startup I was at was dying and a friend I worked with before (a business analyst SQL person) suggested me. They also wanted to put their product in teh clowdz; this was 2008-2009, the startup I was at was a pretty early AWS pioneer. (Pre-EBS, pre-ELB.. it was the wild west!).
Anyway I got in and it was a mess, I fought to help them clean stuff up and to avoid problems before they happened. The devs appreciated my efforts but due to the aforementioned weak management, the monkey dude was actually technically a manager? and I was just an engineer? Or something. So while technically I was "in charge" of production he still kept his claws in enough that he'd fight with me over every decision. I finally gave up and got a new gig when it became clear the situation wasn't going to change. Basically it came down to - I'm used to cleaning up peoples messes but I'm not going to fight for the right to clean up other peoples messes.
Ironically when I put in notice they actually offered to fire that dude on the spot if I'd stay. That made me doubly sure I made the right decision to leave; you should never put an employee in that situation to make that kinda choice. He was let go ~ 3 months later after they hired a replacement for me (they actually paid me contract to interview people for them). They're still around (and profitable!) despite themselves; most of the original people are gone due to a series of acquisitions.
Anyway I have a bunch of stories.. I've been doing internet startups for the last 18ish years. I like some aspects of them but sometimes I go park at a big company for a while to recharge. Maybe someday I'll write a book. I actually collect some of the funnier/more absurd stuff that goes on at the various companies. Mostly for my own personal amusement (and because other people wouldn't believe it otherwise). I anonymize them though.
A lot of the kids coming into syseng/devops/dev aren't necessarily bad, they just are inexperienced and have to learn the same lessons. That's the part that wears on me sometimes.. but if people are willing to take advice/mentoring from old timers(heh.. not even 40) then it's all good.
There has been a few times in my career I worked with lots of smart people (smarter than me) and it was a blast. Unfortunately that never seems to last all that long.
I guess. Lately I think the real difference between a seasoned engineer and a "senior" engineer is just taking that extra 10% of time to do things vaguely sensibly up front. There is no such thing as temporary. At the least, set things up so refactoring them later doesn't require a total redo.
This guy in particular was just in way over his head but one of those sorts who is paranoid about admitting that or asking for help. In fact he was hostile to help. Not really part of my original point but he'd do stuff like;
- ignored my advice to not tie production services into corporate domain (if you ever get sold/acquired etc, you understand)
- ignored my advice to not create a "split domain" with the corporate domain (eg the windows domain was companyname.com, the windows dns servers thought they were SOAs but that same domain had actual internet resolvers with different records)
- refused to entertain the notion that linux was production ready (this was in 2009) and forced solaris as a standard. On x86. As vmware VMs.
- refused to take any help or assistance in installing the base OS despite being a windows guy with zero unix knowledge. We ended up with stuff like DB servers that had 2x swap as ram.. and they had 128G ram..
- For some odd reason was very hostile to the notion of service/host monitoring.. like.. not just against nagios but _anything_
The list goes on and on.
He was just really promoted way above his experience level as happens in startups; they hired me probably 8 months after him, when production databases had been wiped and backups hadn't been successful for months (back to the no monitoring thing).
It took a bunch of years to fully undo all the crap he had put in place. I danced a jig when I closed the lights on the datacenter he had built (we migrated). Did I mention in that datacenter, he setup "redundant" switches and firewalls for the servers.. but had all the internet drops coming down into one single unmanaged 1G cheapie netgear entry level switch?
If he had allowed me to help I bet he'd still be working there. I have no problems mentoring people as long as they're not asshats. Last I heard he was in law school after a stint in real estate..