Well, if you replace "hardware" with "infrastructure", it starts making sense. Somewhat realistic scenario goes like this:

The CTO makes a decision to move to AWS. A couple of "server huggers" on the team start blaming AWS's "shitty infrastructure" for unexplainable latency spikes and increased downtime. The CTO responds blaming their "terrible code" for not being designed properly and points at Netflix.

Right. Or even bare metal vs VMs. How many VMs on what hardware? Many small VMs, or fewer large ones?

This is my life, except the CEO chose AWS and I'm the CTO.

From an outsider's perspective, bad collaboration between engineering and ops (or even among engineers, frontend v. backend) might sound like that. They're joking about the "looks good in staging" trope [1]

[1] https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg

I have seen it, but in very traditional orgs, where system administrators and developers were in very different realms, and mostly communicate through a ticketing system. Similar things between DBAs and programmers in that environment. Why are the queries slow in production?

So it's not an uncommon problem to have wherever there's no clear line of responsibility, and no real shared ownership. It's only unrealistic in the sense that, if you have those kind of problems in a company as small as Pied Piper, I'd expect the product to not work at all.

Developers often make assumptions about hardware in their code, and then will complain when the hardware they're given doesn't match what they anticipated.

Even if it doesn't actually matter for performance reasons, they expected things to be one way, and want the environment to adapt to match their expectations, even if they might be expecting a wholly un-maintainable environment.

And I'm sure it works exactly the other way, too. The developer doesn't understand why the environment isn't what they expect, or isn't like the lab, or whatever.

Wait, so it's "Not uncommon"... so then it's..... ok got it.

It's not a code vs. hardware dynamic, it's a Gilfoyle vs. Dinesh dynamic.

Passive-aggressive bromances are a hallmark of comedy nowadays.

Jared does a good job of bringing them together though

Ever noticed he's like the maternal figure of Pied Piper?

When the actor was on Colbert he said he based the character on his mother.

I'm not sure I agree - I feel like Gilfoyle writes plenty of code and also builds hardware. They have a natural rivalry, but I haven't seen it break down exclusively at the hardware/software boundary.

The final couple of episodes of the second season they make it an explicit point of friction between the two. It sounds pretty stupid and I'm glad they stopped it.

I think it led to a good payoff of a server being on fire.

I mean, that payoff would have been there if the distinction hadn't been made explicit.

In that way, no.

In the bad old days before dev-ops systems admins and engineers often had some pretty good pissing contests around blame shifting and pitching shit over the wall. Though it has come down, in tone, this relationship does exist to some extent still. I think they have captured the dynamic but skipped the actual exchanges/interactions to spare a less technical audience.

To a large extent, Dev has just had to deal with the fact that the they're coding for an AWS world and can't necessarily design for specific hardware. They're designing for a generic "cloud environment" with a few modifiable parameters, because they recognize the benefit in ease of deployment and scalability.

I'm sure it's solved some of their headaches while presenting other, new ones.

Gilfoyle and Dinesh are just like real life brothers. The rivalry and Gilfoyle mocking Dinesh are what brothers do, not real rivals.

Many moons ago, and it was mostly a developer telling a sysadmin "My code should be working a lot better than this!" and the admin saying something about "I told you, your shitty code isn't taking advantage of the awesomeness in this AMD chip!"

I think it was back in the day of the Pentium III vs some AMD Athlon. I don't remember the conversation verbatim, i was too busy petting my G4.

I found that the show was totally off on most of the issues involved in the process of coding and in working as a coder. I put that on Judge having worked in SV as an engineer rather than a programmer; I don't even think he codes at all.

I'm seeing this. I don't get much exposure to the hardware guys tho, so I'm just presuming that it's happening on their end.

It's just rare that you have a company making new hardware AND new software at the same time.