In the same city on the same bike ride I and a friend have been accosted by police for both riding on the sidewalk and in the street. Different cops, blocks apart.
The law is subjective and when you’re rolling around in spandex on a multi thousand dollar road bike and a paramilitary USA “peace officer” stops you, the law doesn’t really matter. You just “yes sir” and hope to be allowed to move on
doubles the cost of implementing anything. Say a customer wants feature-X. Unless you're magically at the point where in your 2-3 year cycle where you're switching, both the A and B team need to implement feature. Of course, that's assuming you don't just tell the customer to stuff it and wait 2-3 years.
You're also assuming that you know ahead of time all use cases and interfaces. It's surprising how dependencies are taken. I've seen large scale systems break when a HTTP 204 was changed to a HTTP 206, or a base36 field changed to base62. Now again maybe you're thinking the consumer can stuff it and update everything whenever you decide to switch over, or that you'll have captured everything and have tests around it. But.. for any sufficiently complex system with a sufficiently large customer base everything about your interface becomes your customer contract. Changing everything all at once is going to break a ton of things nobody ever thought about.
Doing upgrades every 2-3 years means you're pretty much never going to be good at them. Institutional knowledge seems to have a 2-3 year memory horizon. Sure, you get that one person who is a bit of an archeologist/historian but tenure at most shops is not long ("The median number of years wage and salaried employees stayed with their current employer in 2018 was 4.2 years" - first hit on Google). While you're upgrading every 3 years, each team only does so every 6 years. Nobody is gonna remember what it looked like.
There's also a meta point, which is what are you actually trying to solve? Is it so hard to go from architecture A.v0 -> A.v1 -> architecture B that you need to build A, maintain A and simultaneously build B? If moving between architectures is so hard but moving between versions of an architecture isn't - why is that the case and why can't you make the former case easier?
I'm assuming that your plan has you upgrading the A-architecture within those 2-3 years. Maybe you're saying you wouldn't touch it at all and just hope there are no security issues or features or scaling you need to do.
There's also another point which is you've coupled all changes to a particular cadence. Maybe you want to upgrade your network, servers, storage systems, OS, application services, etc on different cycles. At the very least you're sorta hoping that all of those things have similar release cycles, which realistically you're going to be picking some network switch that's been out for 2 years and marrying it to a storage product that was released last month (because the previous one is 5 years old and will be out of support before your next refresh).
And scaling... what happens when you can't get the same server you were ordering 2 years ago? Tell users they can't have nice things until the other team rolls out their massive platform shift in a year? Or would you adopt a new platform to scale on, in which case, why are you doing this A and B team thing again?
And not only do you need two teams, but you need two sets of hardware which means you need twice as much datacenter space, etc etc. Do folks need to two desk phones when you roll that out?
This is a great comment and thanks for the feedback.
I should have clarified the context and my experience. I was thinking this is a process for dealing with legacy bloat and mostly internal IT systems (IT Architecture) in mostly stable Fortune 500 size companies that are already operating at scale.
From what I’ve seen, big shifts are often a one time “transformation” with lock-in to a service. In cloud it’s azure or AWS or GCP. Or companies are stuck on legacy exchange and can’t move to O365 without a major initiative. Or there is no viable path to move from Microsoft to Google.
These things only occur with great pain, and resources aren’t often provided to reconsider alternatives and to stay current. I picked three years because things tend to operate at that pace at large organizations. It’s probably a faster upgrade cycle than where most of those companies are today.
It would be interesting to go back to the drawing board with the business lines to develop tech internally to better support them. Lots of stuff is just operating on terribly outdated systems. There is some lock-in (e.g. we’re going to use O365 for our office products for the next 3 years), but it would increase bargaining power because your org could actually migrate away.
For a lot of applications I agree with what you are saying - pick a good architecture and stick with it. And I don’t think there would be a need to change the way the company works for the sake of change, but I’ve seen enough big shifts that it makes me think a total redesign of an organization’s architecture every few years (or at least considering it) would be useful. Right now a big advantage to startups is that they can design much more efficient IT models than most legacy large corps.
I know if I could start from scratch I’d do a lot of things very differently and could show major cost, efficiency, and security improvements. So the idea would be to take a team who knows the company, break them off and say “build an architecture for the organization that will go live in 3 years” - take the best of the current environment and tool set, integrate new tech and security, and we will start moving users to the environment in 3 years. Then you get to run that for 3 years while the other team does the same thing.
You’re right on turnover point.
I think the whole goal of this would be to never go more than 3 years without seriously considering alternatives for major systems (ERP, HR, Security tools) while giving the chance to have it all be integrated and put into place as a cohesive design.
There’s no shortage of folks being sold “key steps” to high paying jobs. Maybe their meter stick is different from yours, but taking that job as the night attendant at the hotel to move up the ranks or getting a salaried position as an assistant manager at Burger King as a path to a regional manager.
Lots of folks trying to sell you a path to success.
It's not like that. If you want to be hired as a staff scientist, you need a PhD. If you have an MS you can't be a staff scientist. If you have a BS you can't be a staff scientist. The most you'd get with those degrees is Research Assistant or Technician, then you will hit a ceiling in your career unless you step away from research and step more into business. This is true in academia, government labs, and the private sector, both in the U.S. and internationally.
It's like if you want to be a General, you are going to have to be a Private first. There is a progression in the sciences.
I think they got their analogy slightly wrong but it makes sense. If you want a career in research, a Bachelor's or Master's degree is like enlisting. You won't progress beyond a certain level. Whereas going to grad school for a PhD is like attending a military academy - which is the only path to becoming a general today. A military academy has the added benefit of a guaranteed officer job upon graduation. No such guarantees exist for a PhD.
> Whereas going to grad school for a PhD is like attending a military academy - which is the only path to becoming a general today.
What proportion of officers in the US Armed Forces graduates from the military academies? A third? I very much doubt graduating from one is required to become a general. Being a great political operator is but it’s not like only military academy graduates can do that.
> If you want to be hired as a staff scientist, you need a PhD. If you have an MS you can't be a staff scientist. If you have a BS you can't be a staff scientist.
That's not entirely true, though as I understand it is becoming more true; there are definitely places that will promote to positions for which the normal route is a post-graduate degree based on a lesser degree plus experience (including publications under the rubric of experience).
Now, university faculty positions, degree standards tend to be ironclad, though.
I face this unfortunate reality. I am simply not rich enough to get a PhD. I am certainly capable and willing. So instead I work as a tech in a research group of something that interests me for wage that is still too low for my capabilities.
Except, in the case of big tech, Internships pay six figures.
There are other perks of being a grad student than just the pay though...
: sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.
a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn
b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money
If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?
For one thing most tech internships want you to contribute to the business. Unpaid internships that involve doing real work are illegal in many industries/locations.
In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.
Yeah.... I really wish AMD packaged these for their AM2 socket so we could use commodity boards for them. Sure at that TDP your run of the mill mainboard is a significant power draw, but the other all system is still less than the 35w CPU I ended up with.
(I just finally replaced my core2duo with a low power AMD because the price was so wildly better than the intel open and I could actually order the AMD one from retailers rather than shady eBay second hand cpus)
That was exactly my thought -- my desktop is currently a Ryzen 3 APU anyway, and I'd love to go with a cooler-and-quieter option, as long as it's socketed so I can drop in a new chip in a few years as my needs change. (Also hello from the D!)
A certificate is a secret. The longer you have a secret the more likely it is to be learned by others. Expiry is about risk mitigation, the shorter the expiry the smaller the risk.
Here risk is exposure of the key or the certificate being compromised. If it takes X time to break a certificate then an attacker will know your secret for expiry - X. We’re being hopeful that 13 months is unattractive to attackers given the current values of X even at the nation state level, and with cryptography we always have to look into the future not what’s capable today. There’s also a “herd immunity” thing going on if we all have shorter expiry as there are no easier targets and the attacker has to become much more focused.
IMHO there’s also benefits in rotation your cert more often. If you do it once every three years it’s more likely the folks who did it last time aren’t with your company or just plane forgot what they did. I think 13 months is still too long, I’d prefer every quarter because it forces the investment is a control system to facilitate rather than half-automated manual tasks. But that’s not what this proposal from Apple ios about.
In fairness I don’t use social media (well, other than posting here from time to time), so it’s difficult for me to identify with folks who spend a considerable (IMHO) amount of time recording their activities and thoughts on third party systems which have dubious, at best, privacy policies. My naive understanding of these platforms is for you to make yourself discoverable.
Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?
Not sure who the GP is (I'm not dirty myself by going on Twitter just for this), but I assume a lot of people didn't realize at the time (and maybe still don't), that this is the kind of public discourse that does NOT quickly vanish into thin air, and all of the implications that follow?
The law is subjective and when you’re rolling around in spandex on a multi thousand dollar road bike and a paramilitary USA “peace officer” stops you, the law doesn’t really matter. You just “yes sir” and hope to be allowed to move on