stuntmachine

This starts touching on theology. The reasons you explained are one of the main reasons I am a fundamental believer in agnosticism. That is, I believe we see reality through a human lens, therefore we're fundamentally incapable of understanding the reality of our universe unclouded by our own limitations (or assumptions). That's why I think the safest wager is not Pascal's, but to say, "Yes, there may be some order to things, but no, I don't have any idea what governs my reality, nor could I."

I don't say this to incite a religious war or discussion (I've purposely omitted the use of the word "God" here), so if we could keep things philosophical that would be appropriate for such a site. I'm curious if this school of thought has another name beyond agnosticism.

I think you're on to something here. I wonder if a gradual loss of empathy is a product of the evolution of a first world country or advanced economy?

People die less, and without the threat of random deaths, life itself ends up valued less overall.

Humans seem less inherently empathetic toward emotions they haven't ever experienced close to themselves, loss being one of millions of negative human emotions that when experienced less, is less able to be empathized with at a macro level.

Perhaps this partly explains the current political climate and recent spike in authoritarianism among the average citizen in the US. Maybe we've hit a point where the life necessities and healthcare needs historically only enjoyed by the powerful are available to almost everyone and as a result, life expectancy has goes up (meaning statistically less people are dying in any given time frame). People start feeling subconsciously both slighted (economically) and invincible (biologically), and assume everyone else should be invincible too and there is no room for softness (empathy).

Perhaps this is even how humanity self-regulates. What if "dark ages" where reversals in progress are experienced are caused by this ebb and flow of the spirit of cooperation and empathy?

One would think this, but: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia

Disclaimer: Though that's not hard to measure, I did not personally measure it.

All I can attest to is that in terms of the macro level of productivity, it was a better experience. The slider between focus work and social interaction across the team went closer toward focus work when working at the office. Social bonds aren't diminished at all by the fact that everyone has a space to do the best work they can. They're strengthened. Team members feel trusted.

I certainly have some street cred here too: I have been in this industry long enough to have experienced the misfortune of working in an open office. A few years ago, I worked with a company that had private offices -- then moved to an open layout. In my experience, productivity tanked for a majority of the engineering team. The problem with that floorplan? Distraction. There was nothing but "stuff" happening all around you at all times. Imagine debugging an issue, or responding to a particularly precarious situation after a PagerDuty alert comes through, all while the following items are happening:

* Nerf darts randomly flying through the air with a frequency of about 10-30 per hour.

* People using their outside voices.

* People walking around (getting coffee, going to the bathrooms, getting something to eat).

* Journalists trying to advertise the company walking around getting tours.

* Hour long discussions right in the middle of the work area, even though we had conference rooms within distance.

* The constant feeling of being "surveilled" by the management team.

As I stated originally, I've been in this industry for a long enough time, and -- at running the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory (hopefully not) -- I'm primarily intrinsically motivated. No amount of management is going to change my level of motivation, because I find motivation with or without the presence of any external forces. They might sway me just a hair, but generally speaking, for me personally, the MORE I feel managed the more demotivated I feel. That's just my personalty.

I bring this up for a reason: It's not great, it's not terrible, but in my observations, it (intrinsic motivation) also happens to be a trait in the personality of a lot of the great engineering talent I've had the pleasure of working with over the years. People who aren't intrinsically motivated don't typically put in the time and effort required to be a great engineer who gets things done. Intrinsic motivation means that you put in your "10,000 hours" in earnest, with a pure desire to constantly improve because you're enjoying what you're doing. It takes time, blood, sweat, and even tears to be a great engineer, and if you're doing it only because someone else is making you, I just can't see how you're going to be anything more than "passable". Therein lies the challenge in hiring and focusing great talent on a unified goal.

All that said, when you hire for skill and talent, get the cream of the crop, and then put all of those bright folks in a room where they feel like they're being monitored, that leads to a feeling that "I'm not trusted", and that feeling of not being trusted leads to a feeling of "I don't trust them if they don't trust me". It's a very visceral and primal feeling. You see security cameras pop up in your neighborhood, and you first think, "They're watching me", then you think, "What are they up to watching me?". Distrust (even the sense of it where it may not exist) breeds distrust. It sows a feeling of distrust when you configure your company like a panopticon, and that's essentially what many open floor plans end up becoming. The modern day version of a factory line, with a foreman looming at all times.

You can see where I'm going with this. A lot of folks felt like they were being watched when working in the open floor plan, and I'd argue it sapped from their more useful, more lucrative creative energy. This isn't something that's talked about a lot when discussing the pitfalls of open floor plans because it's a sociology subject, but I observed it as a very real, very prolific problem in the organic culture (that is, the bottom up culture) of that organization.

My point is, I have seen and worked in offices that are designed wrong, and Wildbit got this right.

I had the privilege of working in this environment and I can vouch for Chris here. The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. Communication was isolated to where it was needed, and conference rooms exist for when communications need to be had in private. It's the perfect mix. It may have cost more to do it right, but the bottom line wasn't money, it was productivity and the ability to have heads-down time to get real, meaningful work done.

Yeah. :/

It happened to be at the same time I was getting things configured to connect to a new VPN that I hadn't used before for the first time. Until about 7am today my home network was a 10.0.0.0/8 network. VPN kept bombing in the last phase of connecting and I couldn't figure out why, so I thought it was an IP conflict with my internal network range.

So naturally, I then went into my router and changed my subnet for my entire home network to the more common 192.168.1.0/24 range to see if it'd help. It didn't. Until suddenly VPN "just worked" -- which makes me wonder if I needed to change my network at all to begin with.

Then I started experiencing all sorts of weird issues where the Internet seemed to disappear from one minute until the next.

Then I hit IRC when things finally stabilized and see "Did you hear about Dyn?".

My reaction: wut.

TL;DR: I rearchitected my home network at 7am for no reason.

CSSDEVCONF removes $15 off of the price.

Even better, use CSSDEVCONF for $15 off. I bought it for $10 off and then found this code after, and now I'm kicking myself as much as the guy who bought it for $5 off. :)

How did I know I'd find you here by typing "[Ctrl] + [F] jvehent [Enter]" ?

I can't argue with you there. I'm fortunate that my current organization isn't this way, but I have worked at places where this has DEFINITELY been the case. It was mind boggling then and it's mind boggling now. The only explanation I can think of is the (at least perceived) speed and impatience of the modern customer / market. Maybe businesses feel a pressure to make these sacrifices? I'd even go as far as to say the marketing teams for these various "services" capitalize on this feeling of urgency, and try to perpetuate it culturally (e.g. "If you don't use <insert ultra insecure SaaS app here> your company is going to fall behind. Here, look at this list of all of the other companies that aren't yours that use our service!"

Though on one hand I'm inclined to agree with you regarding Nagios, on the other hand I disagree. What you're missing is the concept of developer empowerment. I am a sysadmin / operations engineer, and one trend I've noticed over the course of the past ten years is one toward developers venturing further and further into what could be labeled "traditional" systems administration. Do not underestimate developer demand. It's fueled many technological "movements" in the past ten years, infrastructure automation being a huge one.

I'm sorry I used a term you don't like -- let's get past that though -- What about if the customer you speak of is the DDoS mitigation service?

Even without doing this though, if they remove a BGP route and other ISPs cannot route through them, that's a problem for whoever lives at the destination AS number.

The problem here isn't whether companies are using DDoS mitigation services, it's whether they have ISPs null routing them. The weak point here at the top tier ISPs, not necessarily the individual companies being targeted. You can have the best DDoS mitigation service ever, but if the top-tier ISPs black hole you, you're in a very bad spot.

Exactly. Sometimes I feel like we're playing a game where we see just how many different ways we can regurgitate old ideas in the style of Patrick Bateman (emotionless, preachy, assuming superiority).

Hopefully OP realizes this before it's too late: This lifestyle -- these attempts at maximizing productivity will decrease your happiness. They completely ignore a well-accepted truth: variety is the spice of life. In the 90s we started to laugh at the yuppie workaholics of the 80s for what they were and all they failed (and succeeded) to do. It seems we've forgotten the tragedy of their often short-sighted and unsustainable lifestyle choices because I see them being repeated.

To anyone who has subscribed to this lifestyle: Go watch American Psycho and introspect on how much you're becoming a modern day version of that caricature of insanity (minus the literal killing).

Class. I don't care if people think your style is too harsh. You're here setting a positive example of altruism, and genuinely trying to help out a complete stranger. Props.

I really wish this were able to be run internally on my own server without handing these guys the keys to my castle. I'd do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately that's not the case.

I have reviewed for Packt (for free). It was not a bad experience, and the book is now available and getting great reviews (http://www.amazon.com/Git-Version-everyone-Ravishankar-Somas...). After this book was released and doing well, I was asked to write for Packt as well, but let's just say I would have to have done it for virtually no payment. From what I understand however, this is common with most publishers. I had to opt out after doing a cost/benefit analysis on the project. I figured, if I really wanted to write about the things that interest me, I could do so on my blog.

Some of the work I had to do was non-technical. I would often find myself translating and rewording awkwardly written passages so that they sounded better (the author is a non-English speaker).

That said, Packt is pretty hands off and don't micromanage (which I actually really enjoyed). Most communications that I had with them were initiated by me when I felt things needed to be pushed along during the review process. That said, in the end, a book was published, so I suppose even if the process leading up to that moment was not completely optimized on their end, the end result was a successful book.

For anyone following this thread, a good breakdown about the role of Vagrant and Packer in your dev environment is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWLoTsrFjo0

This is absolutely true, and it's nice to see attention being paid to a problem that the tinfoil hat in me thinks might just still exist by design.