Why are you so angry about this? You've commented throughout this post about how this is boring and the Pinterest team is incompetent. Why?

I found it quite interesting. I've been working in deployments for over 20 years at some pretty big places, and never really though about this before. I now have a new tool in my toolbox, and I'm quite happy about it.

In general I'm frustrated that rigor, standards, etc are out the window in favor of all this warm fuzziness. I guess I might be angry...

The culture change in our industry, towards warm fuzzies and away from tech screens, results in calculable waste. Time, money, electricity, customers. We lose good engineers and tell ourselves they were a bad fit. We push crap on users just to sell ads. Then we write engineering posts to brag about fixing our own mistakes. It's a terrible shame and I speak up about it to remind everyone there was a time when RTFM would be the only response to this.

Edit: rate limited but one last thing: are we this forgiving of Equifax when they oopsie our data? Seeing this would immediately make me wonder if anything I have shared with Pinterest is safe. That's why they owe us a postmortem and not a thirst trap.

> are we this forgiving of Equifax when they oopsie our data?

The kind of culture you're in favor for, blaming engineer for mistakes and punishing them, is exactly what makes the kinda of Equifax mistake possible. Suddenly, people stop to improve things and just do the minimum possible so they can keep their job, since anything else can cause a mistake that will cost your next performance cycle (or even worse, your job).

I know I have certainly left cans of worms close various companies because I knew there was only risk and no reward even though I would have loved to tackle the problem. Fix a major problem working late and weekends and get an attaboy at the weekly conference. Do a good job but introduce a bug that is relatively minor but causes a slight delay in deployment and get on the manager's shit list for the rest of your time there.

I'm talking about blaming and punishing management, not engineers. I'm sorry that wasn't clear.

1. You seem to be projecting a lot of your own thoughts and biases onto this article, and this discussion.

2. RTFM made sense when you wrote code in one terminal window and compiled it in another and then shipped a CD. There is no way you can RTFM for every tool you use at a modern software company. NO ifs ands or buts, it just is not happening. It sounds like you are looking at a nostalgic view of the past, and not understanding the context of the scope and scale of software that is built these days.

3. Engineers should be encouraged to share their learnings with each other to collectively 'raise the tide'. I will never pooh pooh a development team wanting to share their learnings, even if you may or may not think it was a good idea, it may have helped their team or someone reading the article.

4. We've been pushing crap to sell ads since advertising began, grow up and take a longer look, the technology has complicated it, but it's still the same as it always was.

I personally do think there is a systemic problem in companies trying to hire the bare minimum in skills/experience for technical roles and ending up with people operating right at the limit of their abilities (and intermittently being in over their heads).

But do I agree RTFM is frustrating advice for a lot of things. Especially if you aren't going to use such information often enough, so will keep forgetting it anyway and have to start over with the manual each time.

> But do I agree RTFM is frustrating advice for a lot of things. Especially if you aren't going to use such information often enough, so will keep forgetting it anyway and have to start over with the manual each time.

This is related to one of biggest frustrations in the last ten years. We used to master the tool set. But now there are so many tools. Some of them we don't used them often enough. I find myself doing a lot of guessing whereas before I knew what was going on at every step.

> The culture change in our industry, towards warm fuzzies and away from tech screens, results in calculable waste.

I have not noticed, in the past decade, any move away from tech screens whatsoever.

Are we talking about technological screens, like LCD screens here?

I believe they mean screens in the sense of technical interviews to assess candidates' technical ability.

I don’t know, I consider myself fairly competent but I’d never even considered that. It’s just not so relevant until your repo is multiple gigabytes big.

Still, I’ll see if it works for our pipelines, and we can get our clone from 20s to 1s

Good teams profile everything. This team's only goal is to support other engineers. Build time is a huge issue for every ops team. Missing this for so long is wasted money that's easy to calculate. We can be nice to people while still having high standards. It's a missed opportunity for a deeper postmortem, and it's bland content at best.

I think you live in a highly theoretical parallel universe. The one I occupy is the one where 'good teams' profile those things that take too long.

Take yourself as an example: in spite of the wide availability of free certificates you are still hosting your domain without using a secure transport layer. Some would take that as incompetence. Others would assume you have more stuff on your plate rather than that you don't have high standards.

And others would assume, that there are other philosophies out there regarding ssl everywhere. So the question is, who's POV has more validity and logical rigor attached to it. I actually can't see any side winning here on a purely logical level. Only on an ideological level. At least as long as we are talking about consuming public information.

Am I in favor of the aggressiveness of OP in other posts? No. Am I using SSL myself. Hell yes.

Nonetheless, I understand that there are people who feel that consuming public information like on a private homepage is nothing that necessitates using SSL. Even if I myself have a different ideology/value set governing my decision.

I once heard the comparison that it is like the difference of sending a letter and sending a picture postcard. Not sure if I buy into that, but I can't argue against it on a purely rational basis.

Yes, it's by choice. It's read only, public information. We don't set cookies or anything.

We take security very seriously. But we don't take anything too seriously.

Edit: by the way, persuade me that there's an upside and I'll turn it on.

> The one I occupy is the one where 'good teams' profile those things that take too long.

Deciding which things take too long is profiling. Maybe you do it in your head or with pencil and paper instead of using a software approach but I think your position aligns with "good teams profile everything".

This is neither incompetence nor surprising. Maybe you’ve only worked at large companies who have had time to optimize things for years (and even then, I see grotesque software decisions at my large company quite often). Try accepting that software is often written poorly optimized on the first pass, for good reason, and learn to celebrate the wins without needing to shame someone.

This is Pinterest. Every org I've worked at has been smaller. There's space between shame and ignoring mistakes.

The purpose of this post is not to educate. There's nothing in here that anyone can use to improve. It's just marketing.

Well I learned something from this article, and I thought I had a good handle on CI/CD, so either I am incredibly stupid and shouldn't be reading these 'nothing' articles, or maybe there is so much to learn it's impossible to know it all.

If you dont have massive repos, then this is the sort of thing that not often a big problem. Also - if you are using things like gitlab runners, you might be in the same AZ and even large repos clones are fast.

And it is impossible to know it all, I like these articles just for the differing ways people work

It sounds like GP has a bit of a chip on their shoulder when it comes to feeling like you're not worthy if you don't know everything.

Are you just an angry ex Pinterest employee? There is something to learn here and a reminder to pay more attention even when you're knee deep in other tasks. Besides the obvious feature/limitation of git that the author points out.

A team discovers a major efficiency win requiring minimal engineering effort and your response is to... punish them?

People praise my git skills at work (among other things) when they come to me for git help.

My response is always the same: I've just run into these bugs more often than they.

Shocking? Incompetent? A hiring postmortem? Really? AYFKM?

They did a billion dollars of revenue last year, their management and hiring systems seem to be getting the job done.

Yep--although multiple unpleasant experiences with pinterest have spurred me to permaban it from search engine results and smite it with network filters, somewhat wasteful CI/CD pipelines have clearly not prevented the company from flourishing.