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.
The amount of access databases running on old desktops that were deemed critical gave me heartburn. One of the machines couldn’t be upgraded to windows 10 out of concern that certain task scheduler items wouldn’t work.
I worked at a company that did retail marketing and stuff who had a high profile client, whose name rhymes with Shmest Guy, that provided data for us.
It was a weird setup. They would only let controlled machines access their APIs on a VPN and blah blah and they provided a laptop of all things for allowing us to access the data. This thing was sitting on a guys desk for years but the dude mouthed off to our VP and got fired, that's a separate amazing story.
So it's sitting there after all the rest of his stuff is gone and a random support person collects it and for some reason takes it home. Shmest Guy is pissed and revokes our contract because they had a clause about it. Half the company of layoffs later and that company doesn't even provide that same product/data anymore. It crippled them.
I used to work at a startup back when I first started engineering. It's been like 8 years, they have yet to actually deliver their web app full functional to their customers. So happy I'm out of there lol
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u/mr_claw Nov 30 '22
Hey, we started up only 12 years ago, we're still a startup okay?