VSHN.timer #220: Employment in Times of Crisis

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to point out specific cases of Cloud Native and DevOps workers trying to keep systems up and running while their companies are stumbling.

1. How do companies die? Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then all of a sudden. Take for example the case of Airplane: Benjamin Yolken worked there for nearly two years, but earlier this year, they announced the company was being acquired by Airtable and that it would be shut down. In this blog post, Benjamin explains what happened from his perspective as a former employee. Spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty.

https://yolken.net/blog/end-of-airplanedev

2. Some organizations mutate from engineering-friendly organizations into standard faceless corporations in the brink of an eye. Justin Garrison left Amazon recently, and he describes in detail the internal struggles felt by engineers inside the organization. He calls it a „Silent Sacking“, and it is as violent as it sounds.

https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/

3. Yorick Peterse, software developer from The Netherlands, worked at GitLab from 2015 to 2021, and recently wrote about his experience on his blog. There are a lot of interesting details about GitLab (the company) in there, from purely technical ones (architecture, Ruby on Rails) to organizational tidbits (product management, staffing) with broad applicability.

https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/what-it-was-like-working-for-gitlab/

4. Anton Zhiyanov claims he’s stupid, but we don’t believe him. We actually think he’s smart enough to make simple systems, with stable programming languages and libraries, and applying well-known architectures. Anton: even if you think you won’t impress a Google engineer, don’t worry: not only we’re impressed, we also follow your steps.

https://antonz.org/stupid/

5. We know it’s hard, and we want you to take a step back and breathe. Look at the dot in this page and breathe for just one minute, to improve your mental focus before your next task.

https://oneminutefocus.com/

How are you feeling lately? Do you feel threatened by your employer or its specific market conditions? Would you like to share some stories with our readers? Get in touch with us, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

PS: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about PeopleOps: #7, #13, #15, #26, #35, #41, #52, #63, #85, #92, #116, #131, #154, #175, and #210.

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