Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by SkyMarshal on Friday September 22, 2017 @04:17PM (#15315418)

Agreed. I would add a second question to your first: What are the risks of implementing this into production? Get them thinking as a matter of habit about both of those in tandem - what's the customer benefit, and what are the risks of doing it, and does the former justify the latter?

Also, all programmers have a burning desire to build stuff from scratch, which is part of what's driving yours to incorporate cool new stuff like this at a risk to your revenue. No can do. But it may be worth exploring side or 20% projects specifically dedicated to building stuff from scratch. Get their itch scratched on non-revenue projects that serve as potential useful on-the-job training and tech evaluation, while possibly getting something of value out of it.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by watwut on Friday September 22, 2017 @04:41PM (#15315602)

The burning desire to build from scratch is simply because it is easier and because it tend to be more verbally valued by management then working on older product which tend to be snarked at as merely maintennance.

The moment management praise also people working on less new and gives them appropriate salaries and autonomy, burning desire changes - except in few people who are truly naturally like that. It is win win, because the remaining people tend to be trully better in cutting edge tech problems.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by hinkley on Friday September 22, 2017 @05:00PM (#15315755)

I'm starting to have doubts about this line of reasoning. It just doesn't explain enough of the risky behavior I see.

I'm starting to think it might be the same thing that gets young developers to put up with 10+ hour days. That feeling you get when you lose yourself in a problem for hours and hours.

Being in a Flow state is seductive. Nobody gets that feeling when looking through the bug database or knowledge base, or hunting through the source of an OSS module trying to figure out how to ask it the right questions. But they do get that feeling when trying to rewrite it themselves. All that open space to run as fast as you can... in the wrong direction.

It's thrill seeking. BASE jumping for programmers.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by harryf on Friday September 22, 2017 @06:04PM (#15316277)

Programming is based on hero worship. Anyone who makes even half an effort to better themselves as a software developer will encounter famous names from the past - those that "made a difference" by creating languages, operating systems and algorithms. Keyword here is "create". This is not an industry that celebrates maintence programmers. There's no glory for the guy that spent 20 years keeping the system that your banking transactions depend upon.

So naturally young programmers will see to be the next Richie, Torvalds or Knuth and to do that you gotta create something new. Gotta change the world

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by cyphar on Friday September 22, 2017 @06:51PM (#15316631)

As a fairly young programmer, I think it's not necessarily hero worship (though that does play a part). I think it's because a lot of young programmers define their identities in terms of what they do. This is especially prevalent in the free software community. If you're going to define yourself by what you work on, it doesn't seem very fulfilling to just keep an existing project running without having the freedom to make drastic changes that would improve the project.

It should noted though that the above points about Red Hat and "boring" (as much I hate calling people's work boring) don't sit right with me. I know quite a few people who work at Red Hat on very interesting technologies. At SUSE, I work on fairly interesting technologies as well. The key aspect that makes SUSE (or Red Hat) "boring" is that we have effectively solved the problem of release engineering and maintenance (though in recent years SUSE has been improving on it further through openSUSE Leap and the recent plans for SLE15). The funny thing is that if upstreams could do their own release engineering correctly, SUSE and Red Hat would have a weaker value proposition.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by StillBored on Saturday September 23, 2017 @05:14PM (#15321765)

The "boring" comment isn't meant to denigrate people's work. Rather, it should be taken as a complement for a job being done well. In fact I've heard the "boring" comment from a couple RH employees myself. So, I think they understand what is being said, rather than taking it in a derogatory manner.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by Godel_unicode on Saturday September 23, 2017 @12:21AM (#15318092)

You think that Torvalds or K&R are famous because of their creation and not for the long-term maintenance of their projects? That's pretty shallow thinking in my opinion. Yes they created things that we use and love, but we use and love them because those creators took years of their lives and dedicated them to the maintenance (both technical and political) of their projects.

I for one admire them for their dedication and vision far more than for their creations and wish more programmers would try to be like them.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by snaky on Friday September 22, 2017 @06:46PM (#15316601)

There are some wannabe-heroes, but they aren't so widespread.

The vast majority is just being pragmatic. Trendy toys and 'designed and implemented new X' in resume looks so much better for career than 'maintained something old so customers were happy'. Of course, there are some technologies that helps to make pretty good money even being ancient, like COBOL, APL, AS/400 and IMS. But for how long? So it seems rational to move forward instead.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by dsfyu404ed on Friday September 22, 2017 @08:13PM (#15317153)

That said, if you've got COBOL, Fortran, etc on your resume you're pretty much guaranteed to get asked about it in an interview.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by snaky on Saturday September 23, 2017 @08:24PM (#15322547)

Maybe discussion on mainframes transaction processing and COBOL features helping to implement it the way we know it thesedays as 'Cloud Functions' or 'AWS Lambda' might be a little bit more fruitful than reversing linked list pointers on a blackboard.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by watwut on Saturday September 23, 2017 @03:14AM (#15318605)

I love the feeling of being lost I solving and how it can extend for hours in any particular day. It can happen with both old tech and new tech, old project or new project - the only requirement is large task. (Impossible in agile max 4 hours long task environment).

I havent seen people in that state for weeks on end. It explains peeks of productivity followed by drops of productivity. Does not explain long term crunch.

And I mean, programming is not nearly as risky as Base jumping. You don't die coding in wrong direction and you still get paid for it. It is annoying to be wrong, but imo, we are overusing word risk.

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Re:Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat by uiri on Saturday September 23, 2017 @01:35PM (#15320763)

Also, all programmers have a burning desire to build stuff from scratch,

I don't think this is true at all. 80%+ of software work is maintenance related. People who have a burning desire for green field development won't last long so they are few and far between. In fact, this is one of the biggest differences between real projects in industry and fake projects in CS undergrad education.

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