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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

    Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

    And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

    It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.













  • I had the same problem on my first try! I’d been trying to do everything and talk to everyone about everything and just drowned in words.

    On my second try, though, I took a different approach: what if I am this guy, just want to get the job done, and only do stuff for the purpose of trying to progress the case? That worked great for me, and the game is structured so this still takes you through much of its contents – only, now, there is a purpose to it.

    So, thanks, friend! I am indeed now enjoying this game, and I hope you are enjoying whatever you are playing also.





  • It’s difficult to answer without a better understanding on your customers’ workloads and how those trigger your outages. There’s a bunch of valid angles from which to look at this.

    If your product consistently buckles under customer workloads that they paid to be able to run, it sounds like you have either an underprovisioning or an overcommitment problem.

    If you accept customer workload spikes that you don’t have the resources to serve but would be able to process if they were more spread over time, it sounds like you have an admission control problem.

    If it’s a matter of adding resources to respond to customer activity spikes and you just have to do it manually, it sounds like you have an automation problem.

    If your pager load is becoming such that you can’t do project work to address whichever ones of the above are relevant to you, it’s time to hand the pager back to devs. If you don’t have the institutional authority to hand back the pager to devs, it sounds like you have a management problem.