This is taking a totally wrong direction. "Unhealthy" (or, should I say, toxic?) enterprises are well-known to sometimes lay off significant parts of their staff.
It's just a fallacy to think some "cloud strategy" could have been the cause for that. Much more likely, it's been a cheap opportunity.
No, I think it just makes sense to please the shareholders by telling them that thanks to the cloud we can now get rid of 25% of our employees - or doesn't it?
Otherwise I have actually no idea about all the business. I'm basically a hippie, and all I ever learned about computers, I learned from the hackers. And so I was one of the first people in Europe to run Internet, back in the 80's.
Concerning the business, that's a complete different and strange world that I had stumbled into, where I had almost nothing in common with. The other employes were the well-situated upper-middle class people with a degree and a family and a house to pay off; they knew about hackers only from tv.
And there I'm indeed just doing reality TV: I'm seeing something, it looks strange, I don't understand it, so I think. let's just record it for now.
As I said, you need people to manage "cloud-based" infrastructure just like you need them for the on-premise version.
I'm not so sure. What I did for job was to advise and consult corporations in how they could move from their mainframes to client/server unix infrastructure - because that was what all the banks, insurancies and other big corps did between 1996 and 2002.
And for that task it was necessary to know how unix works, and how to design and manage a complex interdependent infrastructure.
Now You are right insofar that a cloud infrastructure does also have to be well planned and designed and managed. But the main difference now is: there is no skill necessary for that! It is not necessary to understand how things actually work. It is perfectly enough to just throw around buzzwords like "docker", "agile", etc.
They just need to do different things. A healthy workplace knows the value of happy employees identifying with their shop. A toxic one doesn't.
I've not seen a workplace with happy people. I think the ambition is to have the people maximum unhappy, and there are thousands of reasons, mainly that the quarterly figures can never be good enough.
I was asked if I wouldn't want to become a manager (that would have been an advantage: managers don't get fired). But I don't want to do my job by making people unhappy.
shopify.engineering
dev.to
speakerdeck.com
