Seems to me the problem is the shared libraries. Yes, without sharing it means you have to repeat a fair amount of code, but in most cases the representation that each service cares about is not necessarily the same, which reduces the value of these shared libraries. It seems that they would have solved a lot of the really critical issues by simply not sharing as much code.

I maintained the shared library for five teams trying to move data around.

The biggest challenge is making the shared library forward and backward compatible with itself for at least a few releases in either direction, because not everyone will redeploy at the exact same moment.

If you can't solve that problem everything gets painful. Doing that right was the second hardest part of that job (meetings were the hardest). The job title (securing the data interchange) came in third place.

Or use versioning and a package manager. You should be able to introduce vNext and then have each service update at its own pace, with a deprecation strategy so that service owners are responsible to get off the old version by such-and-such time. But as others mentioned, part of the problem seems to be too many services given the size of the team.

I would be interested to know why anyone would consider it hate speech. Maybe some of the things the founders said or did could be considered that when looking at it through the lens of modern society. But aside from the King of England, who does it inspire hate against?

Agile methods improved things for a while in my book. Because the old style was WAY worse. Long projects that were designed by people who knew little about the problem or the complexities involved. Everything was under bid and it resulted in every project going through at least 1 death March period. But I think SCRUM has made things too formulaic and it causes bad decisions in project management. I still think it is better than waterfall.

To me, burnout is a symptom of always feeling hopelessly behind. My identity as an employee was always in knowing what was going on, where trends headed, new projects, side work, etc. I now have 3 kids and just navigating the whole parent scene takes up the time I would have spent keeping up. It makes me feel like, if I sit down and watch a TV show it was time wasted so I feel guilty about it. That has really had a negative impact on my own enjoyment in programming.

Yes, I do think "overwhelm" is a huge problem in the industry. I recently started a new job and not been there 3 months yet and it felt like been caught up in an avalanche.

GTD can help. I get a sense of control from simply opening up my GTD spreadsheet and tackling the 'next action' for a project. If you chunk it correctly it really helps.

But it's a business decision to pay expensive engineering time to automate what can be done by people for much cheaper. If the people become too expensive, the business decision becomes easier.

There are places in India where they pay 100 men pennies to dig a trench. Sure, they could buy a machine so 1 person could do the work of 100, but if the machine costs 100k and the guy who is trained to operate it makes 10 an hour, the payoff time is too long to justify. If the guys digging the trench demand 5 an hour, the barrier to the investment goes down significantly.

This is why, if a 15 dollar minimum wage is passed nation wide, you will never order from a person at McDonald's again... and any niche restaurant that does use people will cost significantly more. A large business like McDonalds benefits from this because they can absorb the cost. A small business can't, so big corporation's have less competition and can make even larger profits because they have less downward pressure on their prices.

I can't back it up with data, but I'm not certain that $15/hr would be too expensive for Amazon warehouse labor. Automating those warehouses entirely would either require very expensive, as yet technically infeasible, robots (and the engineering infrastructure to maintain them) capable of adapting to the existing human-centric ergonomics, and/or committing to redesigning all of the facilities around a new automation paradigm. Paying humans more still seems like a better deal for the forseeable future.

Have you seen the videos of Kivas at work?

https://youtu.be/cLVCGEmkJs0

With enough money, they could probably reduce the amount of warehouse workers needed.

I work in a warehouse full of them, I see them more often than I see my own family. They do one thing well, but still require human intervention at times and still run into each other now and again.

Other facility jobs, like picking and stowing, run up against vision and fine motor skill problems that turn out to be really difficult for AI and robotics to solve. They'll be automated eventually, but I don't think it will be soon. I might be wrong, though.

I have no idea if this is relevant....

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-robots-ikea/fla...

People who make 100k per year feel like they are struggling. Their feelings about their finances place the company under no obligation to pay them more.

Equality of what? Should one of the people who works in their warehouse in North Carolina make equal pay with a software engineer who lives in Seattle?

Yep. That's the ultimate goal of the far left. Pure utopian Communism. Sad part is that they don't even realize it.

The equality of outcome controlled by the Government -- to even think about this concept is scary. This shit will def end with totalitarianism.

I consider myself to be a "bleeding heart capitalist". I don't believe that we should be increasing the minimum wage because history shows anytime you interfere with the free market, there are unintended consequences. It's also not the role of private businesses to manage social policy.

On the other hand, I think the richest country in the world shouldn't have people starving on the street and without basic healthcare. We already know how to square that circle.

1. Universal Healthcare that's not tied to the employer.

2. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, make more people eligible, and make it easier for people to get it during the year to supplement their wages instead of at tax refund time. why go through the circuitous route of forcing companies to pay above market rates and raising prices on everyone? Just give working people money.

3. Better mass transportation to make getting to a job easier without having to have a car.

4. Subsidize child care. If conservatives truly believe in protecting life, caring about children means caring about the born - not just the unborn.

Great points, except child care. With subsidized childcare, I’m afraid, you will def be promoting all the wrong (and quite selfish, to be honest) goals and values.

Richest country in the world? That’s quite arguable and very common mistake. It’s not fair to compare US to countries with negative GPD (this sentence is sarcastic, not literal).

I have been unfortunate enough to to leave in a state built on top of socialist agenda. Where the concept is extremely fragile. Once you increase the government’s role in lives of ordinary people (which sounds great in theory! As per Marx’s and Lenin’s paperwork) you are risking of turning the whole country into the ordinary DMV Office (one we all hate an avoid) wherever you go. That’s a nightmare that’s not that far from reality if we jump collectively on this socialist bandwagon.

People are going to have children. By "subsidize childcare" I mean childcare during the day so people can work.

As far as the DMV office that seems like one of the better run places. You go in, fill out paperwork, they give you a ticket, and you sit in the waiting room and when your number is called, you do an eye test, take a picture, swipe your card and you are in an out.