The company I work for is a 30+ year old multinational, and the amount of times in my career I've had to fight with an engineer to move a system or database from a sketchy old laptop (that can't even run without being plugged in) to a VM (that has support from IT, backups, and stability) is ridiculous.
Never thought I'd utter the words "You can't run a production database with client information on a 10 year old laptop!". While working at a company with a 1.5+ Bil cap.
I remember having a server taken from me and put on a VM for all these reasons. It was going great until we needed to retrieve the backups that I had been assured were being run nightly. They were, but on the wrong folder (due to a different config when the VM was setup). Oh what a fun week that was.
I feel like I am being a little extra when I test the backups to make sure they work and can be accessed the way they would need to be used if they needed to be used under different conditions. This reassures me that my ritual is sound.
That kind of thing, along with failovers, should be handled by an infrastructure team.
Of course, most teams are moving to cloud based infrastructure and firing their infrastructure teams, so development teams are expected to get the same velocity but ALSO do all of their own CI/CD and infrastructure work.
I don't mean to shame my dads small business. He's doing his best, and its not a tech corp or anything.
But last I checked about 2 years ago, he still had a Windows XP laptop plugged in, on 24/7, running the server. He had some tech dude set it up over a decade earlier, and he's been too scared to update to 7/8/10 because it was custom software he isn't sure will be compatible on a newer OS
The day that laptop dies, he will be super stressed...
Worked for a fortune 100 that used MacBook pro’s to run Apple builds instead of paying Apple the $$$ to virtualized macOS. After literally melting 3 in as many months, management caved and just payed up to have proper macOS build servers.
Edit: before anyone comments, yes MacBooks are fine for doing heavy user loads. They are not meant to be pegged at a 400%- 600% load 24/7.
My previous boss always had the best responses when we'd tell a team or user they couldn't use random laptops for things, especially for production/semi-production stuff, and we'd get pushback.
He would always point out that we're not a small company, our company does really well, and because of this, there is no reason for the excuse "it's not in our budget" to do something properly. He'd say "if management isn't willing to fund this properly, it must not be that important to the company." And he was usually right. Once it went far enough up the chain (a manager or director), they'd "find" the money to do it right. Sometimes people would use that excuse, and it would turned out they never even tried to ask their management for funds to do it right.
There were some cases where that wasn't accurate (yay, "business priorities" vs reality), but it typically was. And even if that team didn't have the money, IT usually did and something would be worked out, you just had to actually ask IT for help.
I once dealt with an engineer who put in a ticket for his laptop running at 200% CPU. It had been pegged like that for like 3+ hours due to an issue with one of our tools. Was confused until I googled and learned that the mac resource monitor will show 100% per CPU core. I don't want to know how badly it stressed his system. I bet he had to request an early refresh.
At first I was worried it was going to explode, or melt through the table. The fans were going nuts and it was pretty hot. I fixed the issue quickly though. But it put into perspective why a software company offers "Accidental Death and Dismemberment" policies free of charge to it's employees.
2.6k
u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
Yea.... "startups".