Exposing the Dirty Laundry of Tech Companies
No company is perfect. They’re run by humans, after all.
Having worked in a number of companies of varying sizes, I’ve seen the smoke and mirrors behind the scenes. In many cases, I’ve been responsible for the twine and duct tape that holds up the props on the stage.
Just like a theater production, the view from the house appears perfect — the beautifully decorated set is only painted on the front side, while the rear is sometimes held together just long enough for the show to get through the final curtain call.
Behind The Scenes of Many Tech Companies
As picture-perfect and compliant a company may appear, the reality behind the curtain is less so:
Source Control
Not everything is in the main source control repository. Some production code was never checked in. Some of it was in a branch in a virtual machine that got corrupted and never recovered, or on a machine that was re-imaged and repurposed.
There was also the source code that was left in the old source control system. It was never ported to the new one. Just in case the old source is ever needed, the system administrators make sure to keep the hooptie servers for the old source control management around.
Deployment Pipeline
Some companies like to crow about their CI/CD, but rarely is the “C” ever true to form and execution. Something on the pipeline always breaks on its way to the production servers.
Someone checked in breaking builds, because someone else turned off the gated requirement. Or, someone checked in new configuration changes that didn’t get translated correctly as it propagated upstream. Then, boom, the pipeline clogs and blood pressures rise.
The solution is to use new delivery software. After the analysis and final implementation, somehow, someone missed the one flaw it has that makes it no better than the previous solution. So the previous tool is resurrected…partially. Now, there are two pipelines. Two sets of CI/CD software, but the general sentiment is that the process is not twice as good or twice as efficient; it’s the opposite — now…
