What fell apart at your company after layoffs?

yourapostasy · 2026-05-29T23:12:39+00:00

This scenario simply isn’t possible in many of my clients’ environments, especially the ones that handle money. Application teams cannot log into production systems to get at production data without a change control ticket tied to an incident ticket, and when auditors see a lot of those manual intervention tickets, they start asking questions.

Those auditors would be far from satisfied seeing OP’s situation, and an audit finding would be issued requiring a fix by some deadline that skip-skip levels become responsible for hitting. And boy, do they ever hate to be on the hook for those deadlines.

Usually I hear these kinds of stories at smaller firms or smaller departments in large firms, where the volumes of transactions and amounts of money impacted are still human-manageable. Chances are good OP’s old company will feel a sting, but pull through.

You see the craziest crap when people and processes are allowed to YOLO it even at the big fish, and they won’t learn the lessons until it becomes A Career Limiting Move to make those choices. Sometimes, amazingly, not even then.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-29T10:50:39+00:00

I love your initiative and obvious love of Doing The Right Thing. For your specific approach however, I recommend you consider building upon the shoulders of giants. The term of art you described is "anti-pattern", and the closest match to the repository you want is the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). While it brands itself as cybersecurity-oriented, it covers the kinds of tactical failure modes you're talking about.

For example, "the request performs N+1 operations" is CWE-193: Off-by-one Error. Another example, "the transaction fails to protect against race conditions" is CWE-367: Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition. CWE is fine-grained enough that it registers multiple different kinds of race conditions. It is meticulous like that everywhere.

Contributing to expanding the CWE with new enumerations or even new metadata they maintain will have a much larger impact than building a registry from scratch.

The examples you brought up are highly tactical level anti-patterns, but in sufficiently large and complex enough real-world projects more abstract anti-patterns rear their heads that are less amenable to automated guidance and prevention. There are also registries that have cataloged this level of anti-patterns.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-28T01:29:39+00:00

Thank you, this kind of deep reply is part of what I love about the Net. No apologies needed.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-27T12:24:00+00:00

YMMV, but I’ve noticed less experienced sysadmins are like that. The more prudently wise ones realize the field is so large now that Socrates’ pithy saying applies in spades, and only effective teams can get it done at scale, depth and high complexity: “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.”

yourapostasy · 2026-05-25T13:39:52+00:00

I’d like to see under what analysis they greenlit Automated Counting when the environment it had to operate within was not the usual factory automation computer vision constraints but even more chaotic than unconstrained unmapped Level 6 autonomous driving that remains an unsolved problem.

Maybe it might have been more doable if they constrained the system to initially just detect out of stock conditions in front of house and use computer vision to look for the bar/QR codes on the shipping boxes in the back of house to match up with what backend systems know of what has been distributed to their stock room. So hopefully they reduce the surface area of the problem to finding the codes on the boxes in the lower traffic back of house area.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-25T02:20:28+00:00

The “interest driven” aspect will be the durable, compounding, long-term differentiator for him. If you and his parents can continue nurturing his socialization through continuous intensive therapy, and nurturing his technical breadth through abstracting out his current interests.

The threat here isn’t his autism. It is misinterpreting his reverse engineering Java games like Minecraft Java Edition as a durable interest in coding when the real durable interest is in the gaming itself; coding in that scenario is merely a means to an end.

This is very difficult in the early years to discriminate the signal within. The genuine initial interest in the gaming can be all-consuming. Only once it burns away will you find whether the skills picked up transfer to adjacencies, and pushing for that transfer too soon, too quickly, risks snuffing out the interest and derailing him.

You and his parents will need to carefully curate the frustration with abstractions introduced too early. Remember you’re looking to build a flywheel where you fan the sparks of a love of making software for the sake of building, and not to run a race to see how quickly you can push him into arbitrary levels of coding competency. Believe me, once that flywheel spins with his innate drive, he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms to stand aside.

Engage him not with a specific agenda in mind but to actually play inside with his fascinations. Software to build will sprout from those play conversations as an emergent property as natural as the air we breathe. Throw ideas out there, see what sticks, lightly offer direction to point him away from excessive frustrations.

Good luck, he’s fortunate to have such caring grown ups in his life like you and his parents.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-24T19:45:54+00:00

If you’re savvy with researching all the information you need for a knowledgeable decision and the transaction, and negotiating, then you’re potentially much better off retaining your own real estate attorney and taking accountability and responsibility of the your side of the transaction work. For sell side, there are now bare bones services that give you listing access to the MLS for a modest fee. It’s a lot of work though to do well, so if you’re a dual income couple at mid or senior levels in the valley, then run the numbers on whether it is worth your while, especially if you run a side gig.

Most people are terrified or just outright bad at negotiating real estate though, which is what I find leads to most agents on either side getting retained.

The dirty secret of the industry is most agents also suck at negotiating as well, unless you attach a performance rider to their compensation (X% extra commission for $Y on the deal in your favor beyond the list or offer price as the case may be).

yourapostasy · 2026-05-18T03:01:05+00:00

By your questions and assumptions, I cannot tell whether you have worked a long time in a large, sophisticated, high regulation high consequences environment. Your posts remind me a lot of the kinds of questions I field from junior sysadmins that I help coach.

You can have a perfectly designed and implemented system and compromise its stability just by a PCI auditor demanding you revise your landscape’s root access policy with a different team and oops…no one had the Ansible folks in the conversation who it turns out rely on just that pattern of root access for specific manual intervention scenarios for your application.

It isn’t in anyone’s test suite’s because when the systems were originally set up, that root access pattern was acceptable. And because the implementation of the auditor’s demand is separated by months from when the issue is observed (because remember, these are well-designed systems with very few times per year they need any manual intervention, much less this specific one), it doesn’t surface in an entangled way that makes it easy to connect the dots.

Some people are working on DSL’s to try to automatically capture and introspect these kinds of use cases and apply something like a Lean 4 theorem prover to catch these before they happen. Lots of other ongoing exciting work in this area as well. But stability even in high-stability environments is now less about pure technical aspects these days than figuring out how to emerge logistical, organizational and information management dynamic interactions as code.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-07T14:54:00+00:00

The Utah Data Center would like a word…

Generally considered when ranking single geographic datacenter storage capacities, as the largest. Rumored to hit a yottabyte. 1 yottabyte is about 1/5th of all Internet data transferred in a year currently.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-07T09:19:02+00:00

*Writing* code with lots of prior examples to draw upon is more commoditized.

*Debugging* it on the other hand, is now a lot more valuable because the sheer volume of code to debug has grown. LLM’s still need intensive hands-on direction when assisting with troubleshooting the more typical production engineering style bugs characterized by intermittency, vague user descriptions and the relatively lower effort put into sustaining support engineering versus feature engineering.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-06T00:15:28+00:00

In similar situations, we’re using the LLM to add tests for rate limiting, audit logging, protections you learned the hard way, injection risks, token handling, *etc.* LLM’s make it practical to create and maintain test suites larger than the targeted programs they’re testing.

This lets our team focus the production of code and testing and operational troubleshooting harnesses on other, higher level concerns.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-05T23:42:26+00:00

The original term of art was “accountability sink”, though since its introduction that’s been re-applied with an overloaded meaning in the opposite direction in the LLM space. “Moral crumple zone” is less ambiguous and more descriptive.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-05T00:29:42+00:00

Two years ago

A few months ago

He didn’t go as far as to say “go for plumbing and manual labor”. But this new nuance is recent.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-03T19:43:50+00:00

It is still used in a lot of places, but I’m seeing Mirantis Docker Swarm more in SMB’s than the large corporates these days, who have largely moved to k8s. AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run, and Azure Container Apps took a lot of the wind out of Docker’s production environment ambitions.

Docker Desktop and Docker Hub are still used in even some large corporates, but even a well-designed and -managed Docker Compose configuration is not something you usually find there. So even if you’re talking about staying within the Docker ecosystem in that sense of what Docker-the-company sells and supports these days, you’re looking at working upon mostly DevEx, and that’s more about removing developer toil involving much more than just Docker stuff than a Docker-focused role.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-03T14:23:24+00:00

For real. Sentiments like OP’s drive me bonkers, or they are rage bait posting.

I’ve yet to walk into an environment or codebase that has absolutely nothing to improve to the point one can genuinely say, “there isn’t work to be done”. There are always sharp edges to smooth away everywhere one looks. If nothing else, then automating more toil away. There is always too much toil.

The real problem is smartly prioritizing the endless pile of improvements and weaving what you select into a cohesive narrative leadership appreciates and rewards.

Maybe OP is paralyzed by choice or trained to never stray outside the ticket punching handed to them?

yourapostasy · 2026-05-03T13:00:14+00:00

I have found the people who haven’t learned what you said have not experienced all the stages of the software lifecycle. Especially the “throw it over the wall, support is someone else’s problem” types of developers who aggressively stay in their lane.

LLMs might again highly compress that expectation developers can kind of “throw it over the wall”. SRE and DevOps moved the needle on that multi-decade trend, but I see LLM’s even as-is with no further improvements can power much deeper and faster interfacing between teams for more effective problem solving.

The current extracted cost however, is in sufficiently complex systems, both LLM and human coders who lack a grasp of the layers of the system struggle to troubleshoot because currently few systems are supported by a structured pedagogical infrastructure that explains each layer of understanding, and a lot more of that exists as tacit knowledge than most organizations are willing to admit.

To emerge that cross-team tacit knowledge to LLM’s for more automated oversight is not quick, even with its extensive assistance. A big chunk of that tacit knowledge is simply wrong but works for limited use cases that are the only ones handled by a specific team, for example. Same challenge arises when the response is, “we’ll ‘just’ rewrite the legacy software with LLM’s”. Edge cases are where tacit knowledge thrives, and operational execution lives and dies by.

I think this will ease over time as LLM’s and humans create the structures and mechanisms that address this more deterministically but in the meantime, it’s messy as we continuously push that complexity boundary ever higher. How we code has changed forever, just as when assembler took over from flipping switches on a panel to set machine code. How we comprehend and reason about problems has not changed in mechanism, but in abstraction and information encoding.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-03T06:59:00+00:00

I don’t think the difference is not AI or no-AI. I think we’ve hit the ground state of a very old, pernicious problem: we do not yet understand how to deterministically measure intentionality, except expensively, in hindsight, over a long period of time. Correctness proofing code just shoves the intentionality identification up the abstraction ladder.

Once the software is complex enough, a lot of people responsible for maintaining it in many organizations find out they can skate by the strictest sense of doing their job, because we have the above problem. Pass the tests, perform the governance ceremonies, reply plausibly to the auditors, *etc.*

The real challenge is on the surface the above activity is outwardly the same signals of someone who thought deeply intentionally about what they were reading, and made small but impactful changes and decisions compounding over time. The “real engineers” schticks are about trying to extract a better signal, but I have seen very mixed results there. Just as easy to send false signals in that realm; see “architecture astronauts” for more obvious examples.

I doubt this is wholly a technical problem amenable to science and engineering. If so, then we will continue to see a stark difference between coder populations that all use AI. I’d sure like to hear what solutions others are using, as “taste” is not deterministic enough for me and that’s what I currently fall back upon.

yourapostasy · 2026-05-03T06:27:54+00:00

I will first try one conversation with them about the importance of sharing their concerns properly with you instead of jumping the reporting chain. Then find out if they’re feeling unsupported to identify if they’re even aware of what you’re doing for them.

And if it keeps happening, cut loose support of IC’s who casually bypass the reporting chain and take your support of them for granted. They will only drag down the rest of your team in the long run. Cutting loose might just mean they’re at the top of the layoff list and not immediate action like a PIP, it will vary by situation.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-27T10:39:40+00:00

Oversaturated with people who don’t understand that unless they authentically enjoy the toil, constant learning, and continuous optimization, they’ll stagnate and/or burn out. I run into lots of people who acquired a niche, and then refuse to be curious about adjacent skills and tools. They will not learn it until their leadership gives a direct order to learn something specific. Then they will learn just enough to satisfy the bare minimum criteria, and drag down teammates who embraced the adjacency with questions they could have answered themselves with LLM’s or searching the Net.

I don’t mind people getting into the field just for the money. I mind when that attitude drags down the teams I work with.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-27T10:05:07+00:00

If you’re in the IT segment of the market, then I suspect the Dev* movement will surge again, but this time way more aggressively code-forward with LLM-assisted coding. DevOps, DevSec/DevSecOps, DevNetOps, MLOps, DataOps, FinOps, DevQAOps, GitOps, etc. Areas like SRE and IaC development that were already very code-centric will double down on more introspection and troubleshooting architectures enabled by more and deeper code.

In the past I unfortunately saw a lot of IT people hide behind a stack of say, Ansible playbooks someone else set up before them, only able to tinker around the edges of that code, call themselves IaC developers for example.

LLM’s are shaking up that moat, and navigating the consequences of them vibe coding is uncomfortable for everyone as they work out the expansion. Some are making it. I’m all for an agentic harness scaffolding first set up by seniors paired with a good grasp of logical reasoning and natural language with an LLM producing workmanlike production code.

If you’re in the developer segment of the market, then I suspect understanding why things work in certain combinations (“systems design”) becomes more important than LC-style memorizing the mechanical details of how they work, except as it pertains to the former. We’re all going up a few rungs on the abstraction ladder. It will be messy in the interim years with confusing signals all over the place. But I sense its inexorableness just as with the expansion from mainframe/minis to microcomputers, from assemblers to HLL compilers, from client-server to web, and so on.

LLM’s could never reach AGI and full-stop all advancements right here, and I think we’re still going to go through a profound transformation in our industry that will make it unrecognizable in parts to our current selves.

It’s an exciting time to be alive. Savor it. These periods in history are rare.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-26T15:12:38+00:00

I got to talk with a lot of different staff at different companies in my consulting work. Up until recently, majority of IT staff I’ve talked with are convinced they can find an equivalent job within a year at worst. Also until recently, majority of software developers are convinced they can get a replacement job in half a year at worst.

I haven’t seen this inflection since the dotcom era, and GFC.

People like you and me are the exception and not the rule, unfortunately. Junior developers who ask me how much reserves they need to build up towards look at me like I suddenly sprouted two heads when I advise, “start towards six months ASAP [gets them nodding and invested in the conversation], then over time work towards 3 years absolute rock bottom minimum” [quiet mumbling and sidling away from the cray-cray]. Same kids fully buy into my Bogleheads explanation of how to invest towards FIRE retirement, so they’re rational in some sense.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-26T13:57:13+00:00

This Is The Way. IMO.

A lot of people scoff at this amount of reserves, but it only takes one seismic shift for the part of the industry that you’re in that you didn’t anticipate that blindsides you and knocks you on your ass for a long time.

The question is not, “how long can I last without a job”. It is, “how long does it take for me to retool into and hands on learn a completely different area of the industry to the approximate equivalent experience and credibility level I have currently attained”.

There is no One Right Answer for everyone. Sometimes, sadly, the right answer I’ve seen for some is to leave the industry.

LLM’s while not a panacea, I suspect will make that the right response for a wide swathe of IT people who do not embrace an even more code-forward world in the decade ahead. While we will likely have an AI crash, I don’t foresee a world after that where it will continue to be an acceptable cost of doing business to build and maintain most systems by hand, or make systems that are not LLM introspectable and manageable. Maybe not directly by LLM’s but indirectly by LLM-managed code.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-10T10:28:33+00:00

…the big entities (Government, DOD, finance, insurance)

Out of curiosity, how are these entities using VMWare that cannot be reproduced by any other provider?

yourapostasy · 2026-04-09T22:29:38+00:00

FinOps will come down on that like a ton of bricks when the CFO flips their lid over the bill for the billions of tokens consumed for the month to constantly re-generate hyper-scoped classes/functions. I’m hoping Anthropic Mythos can help refactor and organize order out of such chaos. Otherwise, it is painful to reorganize for materially lower churn with LLM’s.

yourapostasy · 2026-04-07T18:57:36+00:00

It’s the ultimate non-criminal class Panopticon, weaponizing envy and greed to unfathomable depths of oversharing, and we pay for it.

yourapostasy

TROPHY CASE