8 ms·

The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

60 points by andromeduck 3y ago

lisper 3y ago
TL;DR: more talented people tend to move on to more lucrative gigs, leaving less talented people behind. The title draws an analogy to the Dead Sea, where water evaporates and leaves salt behind. Really, that's all the article has to say. You're welcome.
- sircastor 3y ago
  I know it’s bad form to comment on articles without reading them, but my guess from the title was that this was allegorical to shepherds burning Dead Sea scrolls because they didn’t know what they were/how valuable they were to the historical research community.
- 6510 3y ago
  I see what you did there... I guess one can write 7 seas of text that might one day be useful to a man looking to eat a fish.
- causal 3y ago
  Yeah that about covers it. I wonder if there's a term for metaphors that make something simple seem more complex.
RajT88 3y ago
After college, I lived with a friend who worked in the IT department at our college. He got called in on a Sunday once, and came back around lunchtime quite flustered. "What's wrong?" "Sam asked me what a traceroute was." Sam was the longtime Novell admin. Yes this was a while ago... "The worst part was, I patiently explained it to him, and he just asked me why that was useful?" Just one example. There was more, of people of low competence who were very entrenched.
- spitfire 3y ago
  Well, it was Novell. So not that entrenched after all.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    It was longer ago than you might think. Novell was a big deal back in the 90's and early 2000's.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Novell primarily used IPX and gained support for TCP/IP very late, and then that still wasn't widely used even around 2003-5. Many networks used both: IPX for Novell, and TCP/IP for everything else. Novell NetWare was most commonly used on a single, flat network with no routers or firewalls. The networks of the era were smaller, and the setup and routing of IPX is more automatic and simpler than IP. It didn't scale "up to the Internet", but it also needed less configuration and troubleshooting. Notably, the "tracert" tool is specifically for IP, not IPX! That's why Sam's Novell-expert friend hadn't used it and wasn't familiar with it. It's like being surprised that someone that had used NoSQL for their entire career wasn't familiar with 3rd normal form and relational algebra.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    One of the humorous tells of a novice is they haven't yet had to deal with all their tool knowledge being obsoleted and haven't had to understand that competent people might not know said novice's favoured tools. The amount of random trivia in tech is a vast ocean. Nobody knows all of it. Specific cultures swim in specific waters, but out of habit more than anything else.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      I knew this Sam well, as I also had worked in the IT department during my college days. While you present a plausible sounding explanation for his lack of knowledge about TCP tooling, networking duties were under his purview as well. He spent a lot of time on the clock not hungrily learning technology, but sneaking off to smoke weed. I watched him once pack a bowl and smoke it while driving on the highway with his knees, coming back from a remote campus. He was very skilled at smoking weed.
trashtensor 3y ago
I've job hopped a lot over the years and now i make about 30x what i did at my first software job. Now I'm sticking around though despite some of the craziness that i'd prefer not to deal with mostly just to prove to myself i can stick around at a job for more than 2 years.
- arwhatever 3y ago
  I’ve done much the same, but I’m curious if you have any other insights to share? I’ve mostly settled into a place with a good pay rate-to-work expectations ratio, but I’ve also contemplated optimizing for pay alone.
  - trashtensor 3y ago
    i wouldnt say i have any particularly groundbreaking insights. Get things done, don't be afraid to learn new things as you need to. The best people i work with at any given time are the ones who are willing to try stuff and fail (but they probably wont because it seems like half of succeeding is just trying). So many devs out there get stuck because they are comfortable in their lane and are unwilling to get adventurous. in terms of optimizing for pay vs lifestyle, i spent some years optimizing for lifestyle but im definitely in optimize for pay mode right now. Make a bit of a bag and get out and go back to optimizing for lifestyle. Things are better that way.
forgetfreeman 3y ago
It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together. If you don't have someone to run to the truck for nails, hold shit, move ladders, etc. productivity suffers because your talent is wasting time on menial tasks. Same thing applies to IT departments. The folks the author is busy sneering at are at least as valuable as the engineers they're actively trying to retain because (among other things) they soak menial tasks that would otherwise cut into their rockstar's productivity.
- cannonpr 3y ago
  Yet I’ve worked in two types of places, the ones that had a lot of menial labourers and thus lots of shuffling of stairs and carrying of nail buckets, and in places that had very few to no menial labourers and just automated away the menial tasks or designed the systems to never need menial labour in the first place. If you want to keep the metaphor some plasterers use ladders, others use stilts. In any case plenty of ways to skin a cat and people adapt to the workforce available to them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- iwontberude 3y ago
  Fuckin’ A man… fuckin’ A. I actually have no idea what working construction is like, but I imagine it’s hell. I hear about jackhammering causing permanent damage to people’s nerves and all sorts of random accidents.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    Having worked extensively in construction and IT (including a couple decades spent writing code) I have to say construction is a much more enjoyable and rewarding career. Pay and benefits are horrible though.
arijun 3y ago
[2008]
dang 3y ago
Related: The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786 - May 2020 (127 comments) The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376468 - Feb 2020 (2 comments)
boffinAudio 3y ago
I'm a 'technician' in a company full of 'scientists', and I can say without question, the scientists need help, the technicians need knowledge, and neither of the two realms can really survive without the other. Sometimes you need the guy who has burned his fingers repairing things, over and over, to review your design - he's going to tell you why you are going to burn your fingers. Other times, the guy doing things in a semi-glib fashion, needs to be pulled off the production line and enlightened as to why things have to be done a certain way. To consider this relationship hierarchical is to weaponise the subject - instead, these are key relationships. A single great scientist with 2 or 3 good technicians can build amazing products. 3 scientists with no technician, rarely ever do .. but there is of course the odd exception where a technician, by making something really great, becomes a scientist, too - and scientists, without technicians and therefore having to get their fingers toasty, often make amazing technicians. (This is why the hierarchical subjugation of the subject must be resisted.)
2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y ago
Internet Blogger A: "I'm super talented. Who are all these no-talent losers in every $BigCorp department I end up in? They take steps to entrench themselves and have no interest in innovating. The high talent people have more options and move on. Why can't I find a high-functioning place to work at?" Internet Blogger B: "What is wrong with hiring process? We keep getting these clueless noobs showing up. They mess up every time we ask them to maintain prod. All they want to do is some random resume-driven development and then leave us with all the problems. Why can't we hire some real software engineers for once?"
- hef19898 3y ago
  You point a finger at someone, at least three are pointing back to you. And one to the ground, that's a different story so.
moritzwarhier 3y ago
> The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. (...), Ruby Raley and I wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal that stated that an approach modeled after professional sport teams could well be far more effective, but no one has yet hired me to try it out. Does this approach also apply to age? E.g., older programmers either take some higher-ranking position (management, product owner etc) or they get replaced?

60 points by andromeduck 3y ago

TL;DR: more talented people tend to move on to more lucrative gigs, leaving less talented people behind. The title draws an analogy to the Dead Sea, where water evaporates and leaves salt behind. Really, that's all the article has to say. You're welcome.

sircastor 3y ago
I know it’s bad form to comment on articles without reading them, but my guess from the title was that this was allegorical to shepherds burning Dead Sea scrolls because they didn’t know what they were/how valuable they were to the historical research community.
6510 3y ago
I see what you did there... I guess one can write 7 seas of text that might one day be useful to a man looking to eat a fish.
causal 3y ago
Yeah that about covers it. I wonder if there's a term for metaphors that make something simple seem more complex.

RajT88 3y ago

After college, I lived with a friend who worked in the IT department at our college. He got called in on a Sunday once, and came back around lunchtime quite flustered. "What's wrong?" "Sam asked me what a traceroute was." Sam was the longtime Novell admin. Yes this was a while ago... "The worst part was, I patiently explained it to him, and he just asked me why that was useful?" Just one example. There was more, of people of low competence who were very entrenched.

spitfire 3y ago
Well, it was Novell. So not that entrenched after all.
- RajT88 3y ago
  It was longer ago than you might think. Novell was a big deal back in the 90's and early 2000's.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Novell primarily used IPX and gained support for TCP/IP very late, and then that still wasn't widely used even around 2003-5. Many networks used both: IPX for Novell, and TCP/IP for everything else. Novell NetWare was most commonly used on a single, flat network with no routers or firewalls. The networks of the era were smaller, and the setup and routing of IPX is more automatic and simpler than IP. It didn't scale "up to the Internet", but it also needed less configuration and troubleshooting. Notably, the "tracert" tool is specifically for IP, not IPX! That's why Sam's Novell-expert friend hadn't used it and wasn't familiar with it. It's like being surprised that someone that had used NoSQL for their entire career wasn't familiar with 3rd normal form and relational algebra.
- roenxi 3y ago
  One of the humorous tells of a novice is they haven't yet had to deal with all their tool knowledge being obsoleted and haven't had to understand that competent people might not know said novice's favoured tools. The amount of random trivia in tech is a vast ocean. Nobody knows all of it. Specific cultures swim in specific waters, but out of habit more than anything else.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    I knew this Sam well, as I also had worked in the IT department during my college days. While you present a plausible sounding explanation for his lack of knowledge about TCP tooling, networking duties were under his purview as well. He spent a lot of time on the clock not hungrily learning technology, but sneaking off to smoke weed. I watched him once pack a bowl and smoke it while driving on the highway with his knees, coming back from a remote campus. He was very skilled at smoking weed.

trashtensor 3y ago

I've job hopped a lot over the years and now i make about 30x what i did at my first software job. Now I'm sticking around though despite some of the craziness that i'd prefer not to deal with mostly just to prove to myself i can stick around at a job for more than 2 years.

arwhatever 3y ago
I’ve done much the same, but I’m curious if you have any other insights to share? I’ve mostly settled into a place with a good pay rate-to-work expectations ratio, but I’ve also contemplated optimizing for pay alone.
- trashtensor 3y ago
  i wouldnt say i have any particularly groundbreaking insights. Get things done, don't be afraid to learn new things as you need to. The best people i work with at any given time are the ones who are willing to try stuff and fail (but they probably wont because it seems like half of succeeding is just trying). So many devs out there get stuck because they are comfortable in their lane and are unwilling to get adventurous. in terms of optimizing for pay vs lifestyle, i spent some years optimizing for lifestyle but im definitely in optimize for pay mode right now. Make a bit of a bag and get out and go back to optimizing for lifestyle. Things are better that way.

forgetfreeman 3y ago

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together. If you don't have someone to run to the truck for nails, hold shit, move ladders, etc. productivity suffers because your talent is wasting time on menial tasks. Same thing applies to IT departments. The folks the author is busy sneering at are at least as valuable as the engineers they're actively trying to retain because (among other things) they soak menial tasks that would otherwise cut into their rockstar's productivity.

cannonpr 3y ago
Yet I’ve worked in two types of places, the ones that had a lot of menial labourers and thus lots of shuffling of stairs and carrying of nail buckets, and in places that had very few to no menial labourers and just automated away the menial tasks or designed the systems to never need menial labour in the first place. If you want to keep the metaphor some plasterers use ladders, others use stilts. In any case plenty of ways to skin a cat and people adapt to the workforce available to them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
iwontberude 3y ago
Fuckin’ A man… fuckin’ A. I actually have no idea what working construction is like, but I imagine it’s hell. I hear about jackhammering causing permanent damage to people’s nerves and all sorts of random accidents.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Having worked extensively in construction and IT (including a couple decades spent writing code) I have to say construction is a much more enjoyable and rewarding career. Pay and benefits are horrible though.

arijun 3y ago

[2008]

dang 3y ago

Related: The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786 - May 2020 (127 comments) The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376468 - Feb 2020 (2 comments)

boffinAudio 3y ago

I'm a 'technician' in a company full of 'scientists', and I can say without question, the scientists need help, the technicians need knowledge, and neither of the two realms can really survive without the other. Sometimes you need the guy who has burned his fingers repairing things, over and over, to review your design - he's going to tell you why you are going to burn your fingers. Other times, the guy doing things in a semi-glib fashion, needs to be pulled off the production line and enlightened as to why things have to be done a certain way. To consider this relationship hierarchical is to weaponise the subject - instead, these are key relationships. A single great scientist with 2 or 3 good technicians can build amazing products. 3 scientists with no technician, rarely ever do .. but there is of course the odd exception where a technician, by making something really great, becomes a scientist, too - and scientists, without technicians and therefore having to get their fingers toasty, often make amazing technicians. (This is why the hierarchical subjugation of the subject must be resisted.)

2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y ago

Internet Blogger A: "I'm super talented. Who are all these no-talent losers in every $BigCorp department I end up in? They take steps to entrench themselves and have no interest in innovating. The high talent people have more options and move on. Why can't I find a high-functioning place to work at?" Internet Blogger B: "What is wrong with hiring process? We keep getting these clueless noobs showing up. They mess up every time we ask them to maintain prod. All they want to do is some random resume-driven development and then leave us with all the problems. Why can't we hire some real software engineers for once?"

hef19898 3y ago
You point a finger at someone, at least three are pointing back to you. And one to the ground, that's a different story so.

moritzwarhier 3y ago

> The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. (...), Ruby Raley and I wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal that stated that an approach modeled after professional sport teams could well be far more effective, but no one has yet hired me to try it out. Does this approach also apply to age? E.g., older programmers either take some higher-ranking position (management, product owner etc) or they get replaced?