tardigr8

This gives me fond memories of this excellent book I read as a kid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

Also hook it up to the Twitter api and multiply any price movements by 5 for 2 hours after an Elon tweet.

Nothing very automated I am afraid, but we had enough people who cared to do the admin work to make the figures reliable.

We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.

We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..

One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.

Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.

We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.

We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..

It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!

I envy people who enjoy and make a living from social interaction or physical work.

I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to me like they are improving themselves as a person and earning a living at the same time.

I need to set aside time to improve my social and physical well being, outside of working time.

Don’t get me wrong I work with interesting people that I love, but we don’t improve our social abilities together

100% agree.

If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.

You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.

A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.

Compared to.

Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.

Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.

Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).

Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.

End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.

This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.

I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.

But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.

We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team (made by the team over several iterations to make it not burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the downtime category (only during work hours of course).

Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..

We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.

If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.

If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.

Another study here that uses an estimate for productivity.

https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.

In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.

Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.

If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.

There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.

Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I like playing golf, but I can’t obsess about getting my handicap down. I also can’t obsess about a hobby project. I can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for long hours.

“Weird psychological addiction” that’s where I would place it too.

I agree. And I tried it too. In the end I couldn’t find anything else to do in my downtime. So I went home at 5 and worked from there. Got up early and worked before coming in. I work from home now so the above is moot now.

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that.

Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.

My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.

All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.

DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.

Your question is "Is it ok?" rather than "Is it legal?".

Assuming you have checked the legality of this hiring criteria in your country/state...

I think it is ok, I live in a country with very little regulation, by choice mainly.

I think it is ok because your job ad will be up front and honest. If you provide context (e.g. you are hiring for sensitive counseling position dealing with specific issues), you can speed up the hiring process.

If you provide no context, a good assumption is that your company has some sort of bias, and potential applicants can speed up their job search by skipping yours. It's a time waster to find out about that bias during the interview process, or worse, during your employment.

I agree it is a steep learning curve coming from docker only. But if you have to scale your app or other resources quickly and easily, I think k8s is the best of the bunch. I have found other solutions more difficult (docker swarm, paas platforms like heroku, a custom nginx and a lot of docker hosts etc..).

If you don't need that easy scaling, then I don't think there is a need for k8s.

As soon as we brought our redis and mongo in house, k8s became easier and cheaper than heroku (and 2 other PAAS solutions that we had experimented with).

After the switch (and a single open source tool) we still didn't need any specialized devops knowledge, we just have developers in house.

> "you will not, in general, see that error at creation time. "

I agree, this was daunting for me too.

I use werf.io now (an opensource project which I am not affiliated with, I am just a user). It deploys my resources and waits to validate whether the deploy succeeded. They call it "giterminism".

You can do this yourself with scripts for sure, but I have not needed to extend any of their built in functionality yet.

Highly recommended for anyone using k8s with CD.

https://github.com/werf/werf