The Colorado-based firm plans to eliminate 875 jobs, or about one-quarter of its workforce, by end-2017, so it can better compete against SpaceX and other rivals, including the Jeff Bezos-backed...
Is anyone else here confused by how exactly cutting 1/4 of their workforce will make them more competitive? I get being lean and all that, but still...
You decide on the one or two areas where you have a shot of actually competing, and then you shed as much weight as possible outside those areas.
It's like when IBM sold their consumer PC and laptop business to Lenovo. The analysis was that the consumer business was essentially commoditised and IBMs core value proposition is in high-value-added servers and services -- the laptops were a distraction.
(In reality, IBMs core value proposition is being IBM, so they could probably have carried on selling ridiculously marked up ThinkPads to the enterprise and government market)
What would have been the optimal response time? They fixed the immediate problem as fast as they could and gave a preliminary RCA, then they did a longer-term RCA and fix. I feel this shows maturity by not rushing to immediate
conclusions and trying to do a 5-Whys drill-down to fix the underlying cause. Furthermore, they also took steps to actually fix the problem by pointing out they moved the human out of the loop in one aspect and that's always a good thing (unless the replacement software is faulty itself of course).
Also, in response to the list, I believe [3&4] are actually the same thing, are they not? The operator was the one who made the 'decision' by accidentally ignoring the incremental config change policy that was in place and did it all at once. This was identified as a human error and they fixed it by enforcing incremental changes.
I cannot believe how many times I have seen a PROD (or new env X) deployment go bad from configuration issues. At least they separate configuration deployments from code deployments, that's a good sign. Why not take it a step further and instead of doing config deployments, use a config server?
In the end, you would still have config deployments, but to the config server. And if you can push config to nodes needing it. you have one less point-of-failure, right? I'm not too familiar with the concept of a config server.
There is no question mark on the title of the page itself, so why is there one here? And even if it was a question, it violates Betteridge's law of headlines [0] in that if it was a question, then the answer would have been no, but in this article Felix is arguing that will be the case.
Didn't even pick up on that first time though, but then ran a control+f to see and it is indeed used a lot. However, the story is self-reflective on the author's own past and I personally did take away some nice points from the post.
Great spot of writing, love it! Finally put to words something I've been trying to phrase myself: "we are not job functions, we are human beings". Plus that whole 'it's OK to not know exactly what you want to do because you're leaving your options open' bit is great as well.
I agree. I always say 'work to live, don't live to work', which is my way of saying the same thing.
I liked this as well: 'I had been dreaming all my life, but I felt like I was finally free to dream'. This is where I am at in life right now, and it is beautiful.
A traveling startup? What a superb idea! It does count as a perfect form of dog-fooding for this startup and I like how neatly the site fits in with telling stories while traveling. Nice execution.
Actually, the Google-provided version restricts you to only 30 days. If you're interested in everywhere you have been, ever (according to Google), then this is quite awesome and you get much more options with how you display that data and what else you can incorporate with it.
Is anyone else here confused by how exactly cutting 1/4 of their workforce will make them more competitive? I get being lean and all that, but still...