"No, Agile focuses on each sprint ending in an output that does something -- ideally something sensible, but not necessarily something useful."
Priorities are set by the customer. It's up to him to decide what's the most useful output as of today.
"If you're replacing an existing process or product, it is not useful until it becomes more functional or efficient than what it replaces"
For a man with a hammer... If you are replacing an existing process or product you shouldn't be using anything "agile" since there's no need for customer involvement and (iterative/decomposed) waterfall is demonstrably more efficient. But it's no wonder they use it, since Sturgeon's Revelation applies here as good as everywhere else: probably as much as 90% of "agilism" goes not beyond cargo cult.
"If the chances of being there "tomorrow" is small enough, giving up ten tomorrow to take one today is the *most rational* choice."
Only if chances are less than 10%. But if you aren't there tomorrow, then there's nothing to lose tomorrow, therefore my assertion still holds.
"After seeing the umpteenth coworker being "let go" for not reaping in enough short term profit, you need to be *irrational* to still think long term for the company."
True, but irrelevant. We were talking here about the corporation, not the individuals with in. If we were talking about where the irrationality comes from (goals misaligment), then yes, it would be relevant.
"The blame starts all the way from the stock holders demanding short term profit."
Probably yes. But then, not all companies are publicly traded.
In fact it can be so. Agile was meant to be people and results over processes, with a strong accent in empowering people. But then, what happens when you empower stupid people? "A literal suicide pact" sounds a good aproximation.
"The approach you take to design, the overhead of process, even just unexpected interpersonal contention between team members who may not have even been allocated to a project before you are supposed to give an estimate."
Yes. And the way RFPs work are not helping here. Even if we accept the RFP to be an excessively precise one (which is usually not the case) what does exactly the customer expects? For the providers having a team of people twiddling thumbs just in case they win the bid? No. What they usually have is a presales team spitting proposals as quick as they can which haven't work in a project for ages, if ever and, of course, the team will be put together only after the bid is won, with the people they have at hand at the time or hiring someone that more or less fits the position after the fact. Given the alleged fact that some developers can be 10x as productive as others, there it goes your gantt chart. That may work on engineering disciplines already stabilized but not on something as young as IT and with so much creativity involved: you make an RFP for a bridge but you don't make an RFP for a new car design (I don't mean here the look of it but the full process from the first draw to the assembly line).
"You forgot that sometimes you need to stop when the client runs out of money"
Agile focus on each deliverable being, well, deriverable: when the customer runs out of money it should get a fully viable product.
"agilistas mostly strive for that endpoint rather than shipping a completed work."
Another tenet of agilism is that it is a thing of the customer as much as it is a thing of developers. If the customer doesn't make its part is no surprise it ends up with burned fingers.
"There is no way in hades clients are going to write you a blank check on the software they want you to write for them."
That's why 'agile' processes born: at the very least they let the customer feel if they are partnering with the right provider as soon as possible -if they take the minimal time and effort it takes. Too many customers doesn't give space even for that minimal hassle.
"If you can't tell them what it will cost, they will go find someone else who will."
Exactly that: they will *tell* how much it will cost and by when will it be delivered. Of course it still will cost as much as the customer can throw at it and it will be delivered as late as the customer can tolerate. If there were only one software project in history, it would seem natural customer acting that way, but the trend is obvious and it's astounding why the customer doesn't end up understanding it was the first provider the honest one and, probably, the one that would have delivered the better results.
"They want to know the price before they buy, and that's that."
Quite understandable also. But then, they should refrain themselves from custom projects and stay with COTS (and even then, given the obfuscate licensing policies of so many a vendor, they'll be surprised from time to time).
"And until that changes, businesses need to be able to predict when their software is going to be more or less complete."
It is usally said the customer is always right. In this case it means it is the customer the one that has to move first, which it's difficult because the customer doesn't have the expertise which makes software development basically into a "market for lemons" which, in turn, it's an stable albeit undesirable state for as long as the good (or service) sold is percieved as of any value.
"You are assuming the corporation you work for is a rational actor. They are not. They are products of paperwork and exist as golems to extract maximum *short term* profits at any cost."
There, corrected for you. Corporations, not being rational, as you said, usually act childish: they'll take one today even if it obviously mean lose ten tomorrow (yes, that's an hyperbole: change "today" with this quarter or next and "tomorrow" with in two years).
"However for new development efforts where we look to write in a microservice architecture, then AWS is simply not an option and I'm looking at Apache Mesos, Heroku, Service Fabric and AppEngine. Now you may disagree with"
Not at all. Either I didn't explain myself good enough or you misunderstood. All these are well and good, but I bet you'll either fail in your next application (and therefore it doesn't matter) or you'll have to rewrite it in the not so distant future because one of your Mesos, Heroku, Fabric won't be there then or will be substituted by the new shinny thing, maybe provided by Amazon itself, or a provider on top of Amazon. And it will be a problem because if IaaS compatibility is far from settled, developing for a PaaS implies an order of magnitude stronger provider locking-in.
"Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen?"
Two things: 1) Do you think fumes go at lightspeed? I'd want to see the bibliography demonstrating that you can single out cars' fumes by the roadside.
2) You are conflating model's certification with cars' compliancy. EPA certificates a model in whole: "yes, VW Passat 2.0 TDi is compliant". Here comes the big mistake: *Here* is where EPA should take a car or three, drive them for 1.000 miles and test emissions as they run (just like the guys that find the problem did) and then, every year buy anonymously and randomly some other car or three and repeat the test. A different thing is to know if *your* car, from a model already certified, is still apt to be in the road: this can be a much simpler test, just like it is now, in the knowledge that you can't cheat the system so easily. As and added bonus, the emissions testing lobby has no problem with that, since the mandatory tests on the individual cars are still in place.
"Blaming the government for not preventing unethical corporate behavior is like blaming a retail store for shoplifting.
Similar, but not exactly."
In fact, quite exactly. But the parent says it as if it were a bad thing when it isn't.
Shoplifting can happen only under one circumstance: the goods are at customer's reach. You can have either an "old-fashioned" shop with your attendant, your counter and your goods pretty protected on the back of the counter under the attendant's watch and then you won't suffer shoplifting, or you can have an open shop, where you require less employees per unit sold and the customer will be able to easily reach the goods making your sell easier and then suffer shoplifting. It is a calculated decision based on risk and financial outcome.
It's only that after the trade-offs calculated and the decision taken, then, when the shoplifting happens, the owner will cry wolf and require my taxes to pay for their extra protection.
It is so damn easy it hurts. In fact, the EPA is doing such an AWFUL job there that I'm almost glad car manufacturers cheat it.
What you don't seem to understand is that certification covers a whole car model, not each and every car out of the production line. A different issue is the test you pass to your car to ensure it is still in working conditions.
For the certification to be basically uncheatable you just need to do the obvious thing: take one car, put all the required logging machinery in the trunk and the probe into the exhaust pipe and go wandering over there 1.000 miles. After that, each year you randomly buy a car and repeat the test.
"It amounts to exactly the same thing. If you make the test trivially detectable, then your test depends entirely on trust, and if you actually have that kind of trust, you don't need the test anyway."
It's even worse than that: the EPA certification process basically ends up with the car manufacturer being the one doing the certification while the EPA only reviews that all the paperwork is in place.
-You all know, folks, VW is a company strongly compromised with the environment, so we are going to try to reduce our emissions. OK? -OK, boss. -But, of course, we still need to sell our cars at a price so what we are going to do is to fine-tune the ECU so, as far as possible it avoids emissions. Only when full throttle is required will let full power. So, if, for instance, someone is throttling at a stop, you know, broooom, broooom, we'll open full the EGR valve to reduce emisions, OK? -Hummm... it looks a bit weird, isnt' it? Is it legal? What about the emissions control tests, for instance? -Good you ask. Take, this is the European Emissions Standard (we are Geman, remember?), study it and see for yourself. Obviously our legal dpt has already studied the issue and told us it's perfectly legal. I don't ask them technical questions and I shouldn't take your opinion in legal questions either, but if this makes you more confident, please go ahead. -Hummm... you are right: there's nothing against your requirement. -Go back to job them, boys! -Yes, boss!
"But even if we feel what we're being paid for is unethical, only in the most extreme cases is it our decision."
Well, it's always our decision, we are adults, aren't we? Some people decide not to say "no" to their boss even with full knowledge it should be "no" while others voluntarily enlist to a war thousands of miles away. Letting it go is still taking a decision. But...
"The ethics of a particular technology are often tricky"
Exactly that. And we tend to rationalize quite well our decisions also (see yourself above: "it was not my decision" Damn, surely it was!). But let's talk about decisions:
On one hand, it was Adam Smith the one explaining how specialization was the way to wealth. Among a lot of others, there are the people whose role is taking decisions and there's the role of those making things work. The other day, here, in the first thread about this very issue it was said by more than one "but you can't expect the executive officers to be technically knowledgeable, that's not their job!" Well, if that's true, conversely you can't hold the engineers accountable for the company's decision making since that's not their role either and remember here we are not talking about anything that patently would lead to immediate live endangerment or big financial loses.
Even more in this case: for all that I know, while "tricking the tests" is something explicitly forbidden in USA it is not in EU and remember VW is German, not American so if the boss says to the engineer team "there's no point in contaminating the atmosphere when the car is idle, so why don't you guys program the ECU so it reduces emissions if, for instance, somebody is "brooming" the car while stopped, uh?" why they shouldn't do it?
"It's the fact that they only focus on infrastructure"
You are not looking carefully enough.
"In that sense, Microsoft is far, far ahead of the others"
You know what happens with the ones too far, far ahead of others? In the future, people rise statues honoring them, but they usually die poor and/or too young.
It's quite funny you talk about Microsoft since, back in the day, it was Novell the one far, far ahead of Microsoft on PC-based client/server deployments. And know what? Microsoft not only didn't give a damn but they mocked Novell as too complex. And they were right: most people wasn't ready for Novell forests and inherited/nested permissions and Windows for Workgroups was everything they could cope with. Then they grew up to "classic" domains, still tad simpler than Novell while still being "good enough" for their customer base (in fact, being not only "good enough" but "top notch" since for most of them it was all they knew as in practical terms it was Microsoft itself the one "educating" them).
Eventually, Novell died and, who could think about it!? the very next day Microsoft came up with their new and shinny Active Domains that were basically what Novell had been doing since ten years before: now, somehow, that wasn't "too complex" anymore but the only true way.
I'd say Amazon is exactly on the same track today: on one hand, most people, as you say, is not ready yet for higher abstraction levels like PaaS, IaaS is good enough and strongly growing. On the other hand, PaaS market is far from mature enough: writing code against any public API today is guaranteed to have it rewritten even before the provider gets to declare it non-beta.
And there's even more: it's said that in the gold rush, the only ones consistently making money where the shovel shops, not the miners: nowadays, the "hardware store" is Amazon and it is the people building on top of AWS the ones taking the real risks of doing business. And Amazon is not just seeing the time going by: few years back they offered pretty simple virtual machines; now they offer quite a complex landscape with databases, routing, DNS, load balancing, tiered persistent storage... They are the Microsoft of today mocking on the ones too far, far ahead while, at the same time, cultivating their own customer base to make them ready for their future products and services.
"I save about an hour a day using one I bought with my own money. If the company bought them for all of the devs, they'd pay for themselves in less than a month, but instead we're stuck in the 1990s."
Why they should do it!? No matter how fast their investment gets returned it's even better if they have the benefit with zero investment.
You buying your own SSD are part of the problem, not of the solution!
"This is an amazingly difficult concept to get people to understand. I've had way too many conversations with people who are sure they need an instantaneous failure-proof disaster recovery plan."
Given your nickname it seems no wonder that you grasp the concept. Exactly yes to all you say.
"It makes them feel unimportant, which most executives and business owners can't live with."
That's true, but I'd say it's only half of the story. Specially business owners are quite sensible to the money part and quickly understand that there's no point in expending 1M upfront and then 100.000 a year in protecting from an outage with a 10 years recurrence that risks 500.000 in loses. From my experience, the other half of the story, specially dealing with non-director's board level management is the CYA part. You make the assess, the numbers are sensible and everybody agrees with that but, in the end, you are still gambling; most managers will gladly pay a lot of (company's) money just to avoid the chance of being the one having to go upstairs to tell the big boys that shit happened above and beyond the disaster recovery plan coverage -just as expected, but still...
Some anecdotes, just for fun: -We need wide geographical coverage. We can't stand a local disaster since it would make us lose about 500.000 a day. -Well, your CRM says 80% of your billing comes from companies within this industry complex... do you think a local disaster won't impact your sellings anyway?
-We need new offices within 72 hours in case this building is lost because we can't afford paying our employees for nothing. -Well, do you remember that, even if the building is gone off-hours without live loses, as per local labour law the company can forcibly set the dates of 11 out of the standard 22 days of yearly holidays so in case of disaster you can send your people home two weeks without it costing you an extra dime in wages nor lost productivity along a year? (this one was not so simple, but the nut of the case was this)
-We need live migration between those two datacenters so in case of disaster there's sub-minute service disruption. -You see... this is quite costly and all you are basically doing is serving almost 100% static content with only minor changes. Wouldn't it be better is you spread the static load and/or let the content converge somewhere between 1 and 6 hours and drive down the costs ten-fold?
"Large IT companies seem to make most of it's money by taking on customers that nobody in their right mind would take on, basically due to the fines and punishments that come with abject stuff-ups for mission critical system from three-letter agencies and large companies."
It's a multiple ways venue.
On one hand, yes, only big names can cover for fines, punishments and guarantees required to bid for some kind of contracts. At the same time, only big firms have the cash for the long term commitment it takes to go in terms with the (public or private) companies that requests those proposals (paying a whole year or more of an expensive KAM just to open the door of a government agency or the like is not something everybody can do).
But the customers do their part too: too many times they don't know anything out of the big providers and lack also the technical acumen to discern the wheat from the chaff so they only know what the KAM above has told them and end up with an RFP for a bazillion contract for something that, done properly, could cost 10 to 100 times less -but now only the big names can apply.
In the end, the big names manage to get a profit out of it because in practice this market is under an oligopoly system where there are only half a dozen participants with real options to win those kind of contracts.
"And what the fuck is up with "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center is calling for calmer than normal storm activity this hurricane season"? You don't call for that, you predict it. Calls are to be answered (or not). Predictions are to be met (or not)."
Nononono... This is the United States of Almighty America. When NOAA calls, hurricanes abide! (or else, we send Chuck Norris).
Slashdot Mirror
"I suppose the counter might be the adage concerning a bird in the hand being better than two in the bush but, in many cases, you're likely correct."
You just ask Kodak or SCO.
"No, Agile focuses on each sprint ending in an output that does something -- ideally something sensible, but not necessarily something useful."
Priorities are set by the customer. It's up to him to decide what's the most useful output as of today.
"If you're replacing an existing process or product, it is not useful until it becomes more functional or efficient than what it replaces"
For a man with a hammer... If you are replacing an existing process or product you shouldn't be using anything "agile" since there's no need for customer involvement and (iterative/decomposed) waterfall is demonstrably more efficient. But it's no wonder they use it, since Sturgeon's Revelation applies here as good as everywhere else: probably as much as 90% of "agilism" goes not beyond cargo cult.
"If the chances of being there "tomorrow" is small enough, giving up ten tomorrow to take one today is the *most rational* choice."
Only if chances are less than 10%. But if you aren't there tomorrow, then there's nothing to lose tomorrow, therefore my assertion still holds.
"After seeing the umpteenth coworker being "let go" for not reaping in enough short term profit, you need to be *irrational* to still think long term for the company."
True, but irrelevant. We were talking here about the corporation, not the individuals with in. If we were talking about where the irrationality comes from (goals misaligment), then yes, it would be relevant.
"The blame starts all the way from the stock holders demanding short term profit."
Probably yes. But then, not all companies are publicly traded.
"Agile is a literal suicide pact"
In fact it can be so. Agile was meant to be people and results over processes, with a strong accent in empowering people. But then, what happens when you empower stupid people? "A literal suicide pact" sounds a good aproximation.
"The approach you take to design, the overhead of process, even just unexpected interpersonal contention between team members who may not have even been allocated to a project before you are supposed to give an estimate."
Yes. And the way RFPs work are not helping here. Even if we accept the RFP to be an excessively precise one (which is usually not the case) what does exactly the customer expects? For the providers having a team of people twiddling thumbs just in case they win the bid? No. What they usually have is a presales team spitting proposals as quick as they can which haven't work in a project for ages, if ever and, of course, the team will be put together only after the bid is won, with the people they have at hand at the time or hiring someone that more or less fits the position after the fact. Given the alleged fact that some developers can be 10x as productive as others, there it goes your gantt chart. That may work on engineering disciplines already stabilized but not on something as young as IT and with so much creativity involved: you make an RFP for a bridge but you don't make an RFP for a new car design (I don't mean here the look of it but the full process from the first draw to the assembly line).
"You forgot that sometimes you need to stop when the client runs out of money"
Agile focus on each deliverable being, well, deriverable: when the customer runs out of money it should get a fully viable product.
"agilistas mostly strive for that endpoint rather than shipping a completed work."
Another tenet of agilism is that it is a thing of the customer as much as it is a thing of developers. If the customer doesn't make its part is no surprise it ends up with burned fingers.
"There is no way in hades clients are going to write you a blank check on the software they want you to write for them."
That's why 'agile' processes born: at the very least they let the customer feel if they are partnering with the right provider as soon as possible -if they take the minimal time and effort it takes. Too many customers doesn't give space even for that minimal hassle.
"If you can't tell them what it will cost, they will go find someone else who will."
Exactly that: they will *tell* how much it will cost and by when will it be delivered. Of course it still will cost as much as the customer can throw at it and it will be delivered as late as the customer can tolerate. If there were only one software project in history, it would seem natural customer acting that way, but the trend is obvious and it's astounding why the customer doesn't end up understanding it was the first provider the honest one and, probably, the one that would have delivered the better results.
"They want to know the price before they buy, and that's that."
Quite understandable also. But then, they should refrain themselves from custom projects and stay with COTS (and even then, given the obfuscate licensing policies of so many a vendor, they'll be surprised from time to time).
"And until that changes, businesses need to be able to predict when their software is going to be more or less complete."
It is usally said the customer is always right. In this case it means it is the customer the one that has to move first, which it's difficult because the customer doesn't have the expertise which makes software development basically into a "market for lemons" which, in turn, it's an stable albeit undesirable state for as long as the good (or service) sold is percieved as of any value.
"You are assuming the corporation you work for is a rational actor. They are not. They are products of paperwork and exist as golems to extract maximum *short term* profits at any cost."
There, corrected for you. Corporations, not being rational, as you said, usually act childish: they'll take one today even if it obviously mean lose ten tomorrow (yes, that's an hyperbole: change "today" with this quarter or next and "tomorrow" with in two years).
"However for new development efforts where we look to write in a microservice architecture, then AWS is simply not an option and I'm looking at Apache Mesos, Heroku, Service Fabric and AppEngine. Now you may disagree with"
Not at all. Either I didn't explain myself good enough or you misunderstood. All these are well and good, but I bet you'll either fail in your next application (and therefore it doesn't matter) or you'll have to rewrite it in the not so distant future because one of your Mesos, Heroku, Fabric won't be there then or will be substituted by the new shinny thing, maybe provided by Amazon itself, or a provider on top of Amazon. And it will be a problem because if IaaS compatibility is far from settled, developing for a PaaS implies an order of magnitude stronger provider locking-in.
"Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen?"
Two things:
1) Do you think fumes go at lightspeed? I'd want to see the bibliography demonstrating that you can single out cars' fumes by the roadside.
2) You are conflating model's certification with cars' compliancy. EPA certificates a model in whole: "yes, VW Passat 2.0 TDi is compliant". Here comes the big mistake: *Here* is where EPA should take a car or three, drive them for 1.000 miles and test emissions as they run (just like the guys that find the problem did) and then, every year buy anonymously and randomly some other car or three and repeat the test. A different thing is to know if *your* car, from a model already certified, is still apt to be in the road: this can be a much simpler test, just like it is now, in the knowledge that you can't cheat the system so easily. As and added bonus, the emissions testing lobby has no problem with that, since the mandatory tests on the individual cars are still in place.
"Blaming the government for not preventing unethical corporate behavior is like blaming a retail store for shoplifting.
Similar, but not exactly."
In fact, quite exactly. But the parent says it as if it were a bad thing when it isn't.
Shoplifting can happen only under one circumstance: the goods are at customer's reach. You can have either an "old-fashioned" shop with your attendant, your counter and your goods pretty protected on the back of the counter under the attendant's watch and then you won't suffer shoplifting, or you can have an open shop, where you require less employees per unit sold and the customer will be able to easily reach the goods making your sell easier and then suffer shoplifting. It is a calculated decision based on risk and financial outcome.
It's only that after the trade-offs calculated and the decision taken, then, when the shoplifting happens, the owner will cry wolf and require my taxes to pay for their extra protection.
"Ok wise guy - how would you design the test?"
It is so damn easy it hurts. In fact, the EPA is doing such an AWFUL job there that I'm almost glad car manufacturers cheat it.
What you don't seem to understand is that certification covers a whole car model, not each and every car out of the production line. A different issue is the test you pass to your car to ensure it is still in working conditions.
For the certification to be basically uncheatable you just need to do the obvious thing: take one car, put all the required logging machinery in the trunk and the probe into the exhaust pipe and go wandering over there 1.000 miles. After that, each year you randomly buy a car and repeat the test.
Try to cheat that.
"It amounts to exactly the same thing. If you make the test trivially detectable, then your test depends entirely on trust, and if you actually have that kind of trust, you don't need the test anyway."
It's even worse than that: the EPA certification process basically ends up with the car manufacturer being the one doing the certification while the EPA only reviews that all the paperwork is in place.
"except for births and emergency room visits, one out of three patients in a hospital will die"
My bet is that all three will die, along with births and visits too.
It might take a while for some of them, though.
"So I would be surprised if that happened at VW."
The German boss to the German engineering team:
-You all know, folks, VW is a company strongly compromised with the environment, so we are going to try to reduce our emissions. OK?
-OK, boss.
-But, of course, we still need to sell our cars at a price so what we are going to do is to fine-tune the ECU so, as far as possible it avoids emissions. Only when full throttle is required will let full power. So, if, for instance, someone is throttling at a stop, you know, broooom, broooom, we'll open full the EGR valve to reduce emisions, OK?
-Hummm... it looks a bit weird, isnt' it? Is it legal? What about the emissions control tests, for instance?
-Good you ask. Take, this is the European Emissions Standard (we are Geman, remember?), study it and see for yourself. Obviously our legal dpt has already studied the issue and told us it's perfectly legal. I don't ask them technical questions and I shouldn't take your opinion in legal questions either, but if this makes you more confident, please go ahead.
-Hummm... you are right: there's nothing against your requirement.
-Go back to job them, boys!
-Yes, boss!
"But even if we feel what we're being paid for is unethical, only in the most extreme cases is it our decision."
Well, it's always our decision, we are adults, aren't we? Some people decide not to say "no" to their boss even with full knowledge it should be "no" while others voluntarily enlist to a war thousands of miles away. Letting it go is still taking a decision. But...
"The ethics of a particular technology are often tricky"
Exactly that. And we tend to rationalize quite well our decisions also (see yourself above: "it was not my decision" Damn, surely it was!). But let's talk about decisions:
On one hand, it was Adam Smith the one explaining how specialization was the way to wealth. Among a lot of others, there are the people whose role is taking decisions and there's the role of those making things work. The other day, here, in the first thread about this very issue it was said by more than one "but you can't expect the executive officers to be technically knowledgeable, that's not their job!" Well, if that's true, conversely you can't hold the engineers accountable for the company's decision making since that's not their role either and remember here we are not talking about anything that patently would lead to immediate live endangerment or big financial loses.
Even more in this case: for all that I know, while "tricking the tests" is something explicitly forbidden in USA it is not in EU and remember VW is German, not American so if the boss says to the engineer team "there's no point in contaminating the atmosphere when the car is idle, so why don't you guys program the ECU so it reduces emissions if, for instance, somebody is "brooming" the car while stopped, uh?" why they shouldn't do it?
"It's the fact that they only focus on infrastructure"
You are not looking carefully enough.
"In that sense, Microsoft is far, far ahead of the others"
You know what happens with the ones too far, far ahead of others? In the future, people rise statues honoring them, but they usually die poor and/or too young.
It's quite funny you talk about Microsoft since, back in the day, it was Novell the one far, far ahead of Microsoft on PC-based client/server deployments. And know what? Microsoft not only didn't give a damn but they mocked Novell as too complex. And they were right: most people wasn't ready for Novell forests and inherited/nested permissions and Windows for Workgroups was everything they could cope with. Then they grew up to "classic" domains, still tad simpler than Novell while still being "good enough" for their customer base (in fact, being not only "good enough" but "top notch" since for most of them it was all they knew as in practical terms it was Microsoft itself the one "educating" them).
Eventually, Novell died and, who could think about it!? the very next day Microsoft came up with their new and shinny Active Domains that were basically what Novell had been doing since ten years before: now, somehow, that wasn't "too complex" anymore but the only true way.
I'd say Amazon is exactly on the same track today: on one hand, most people, as you say, is not ready yet for higher abstraction levels like PaaS, IaaS is good enough and strongly growing. On the other hand, PaaS market is far from mature enough: writing code against any public API today is guaranteed to have it rewritten even before the provider gets to declare it non-beta.
And there's even more: it's said that in the gold rush, the only ones consistently making money where the shovel shops, not the miners: nowadays, the "hardware store" is Amazon and it is the people building on top of AWS the ones taking the real risks of doing business. And Amazon is not just seeing the time going by: few years back they offered pretty simple virtual machines; now they offer quite a complex landscape with databases, routing, DNS, load balancing, tiered persistent storage... They are the Microsoft of today mocking on the ones too far, far ahead while, at the same time, cultivating their own customer base to make them ready for their future products and services.
"I save about an hour a day using one I bought with my own money. If the company bought them for all of the devs, they'd pay for themselves in less than a month, but instead we're stuck in the 1990s."
Why they should do it!? No matter how fast their investment gets returned it's even better if they have the benefit with zero investment.
You buying your own SSD are part of the problem, not of the solution!
"This is an amazingly difficult concept to get people to understand. I've had way too many conversations with people who are sure they need an instantaneous failure-proof disaster recovery plan."
Given your nickname it seems no wonder that you grasp the concept. Exactly yes to all you say.
"It makes them feel unimportant, which most executives and business owners can't live with."
That's true, but I'd say it's only half of the story. Specially business owners are quite sensible to the money part and quickly understand that there's no point in expending 1M upfront and then 100.000 a year in protecting from an outage with a 10 years recurrence that risks 500.000 in loses. From my experience, the other half of the story, specially dealing with non-director's board level management is the CYA part. You make the assess, the numbers are sensible and everybody agrees with that but, in the end, you are still gambling; most managers will gladly pay a lot of (company's) money just to avoid the chance of being the one having to go upstairs to tell the big boys that shit happened above and beyond the disaster recovery plan coverage -just as expected, but still...
Some anecdotes, just for fun:
-We need wide geographical coverage. We can't stand a local disaster since it would make us lose about 500.000 a day.
-Well, your CRM says 80% of your billing comes from companies within this industry complex... do you think a local disaster won't impact your sellings anyway?
-We need new offices within 72 hours in case this building is lost because we can't afford paying our employees for nothing.
-Well, do you remember that, even if the building is gone off-hours without live loses, as per local labour law the company can forcibly set the dates of 11 out of the standard 22 days of yearly holidays so in case of disaster you can send your people home two weeks without it costing you an extra dime in wages nor lost productivity along a year? (this one was not so simple, but the nut of the case was this)
-We need live migration between those two datacenters so in case of disaster there's sub-minute service disruption.
-You see... this is quite costly and all you are basically doing is serving almost 100% static content with only minor changes. Wouldn't it be better is you spread the static load and/or let the content converge somewhere between 1 and 6 hours and drive down the costs ten-fold?
C'mon, Lumpy, we all know it's you.
"the kids in trouble were imagining / play acting a fictional situation that, if true, would have been cause for alarm."
Of course yes. If a Godzilla-type dinosaur appeared all of a sudden I would consider it cause for alarm.
But what would really freak me out would be the sight of a boy with a gun trying to kill it.
Really, I mean it.
"Large IT companies seem to make most of it's money by taking on customers that nobody in their right mind would take on, basically due to the fines and punishments that come with abject stuff-ups for mission critical system from three-letter agencies and large companies."
It's a multiple ways venue.
On one hand, yes, only big names can cover for fines, punishments and guarantees required to bid for some kind of contracts. At the same time, only big firms have the cash for the long term commitment it takes to go in terms with the (public or private) companies that requests those proposals (paying a whole year or more of an expensive KAM just to open the door of a government agency or the like is not something everybody can do).
But the customers do their part too: too many times they don't know anything out of the big providers and lack also the technical acumen to discern the wheat from the chaff so they only know what the KAM above has told them and end up with an RFP for a bazillion contract for something that, done properly, could cost 10 to 100 times less -but now only the big names can apply.
In the end, the big names manage to get a profit out of it because in practice this market is under an oligopoly system where there are only half a dozen participants with real options to win those kind of contracts.
I see your low ID and I can't but asking... are you really *that* obtuse?
"And what the fuck is up with "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center is calling for calmer than normal storm activity this hurricane season"? You don't call for that, you predict it. Calls are to be answered (or not). Predictions are to be met (or not)."
Nononono... This is the United States of Almighty America. When NOAA calls, hurricanes abide! (or else, we send Chuck Norris).