Software Friction

In my experience, the tooling that causes the most friction when it doesn't work is also the most likely to be abandoned, community supported, or only supported by an India team (requiring an overnight for each round-trip communication). Directors and VPs talk a big game about prioritizing developer productivity, but when it comes time to staff a support channel, prioritize a bug fix, or choose who to lay off, it always turns out that they were lying.

Thriving as a SWE in a medium-to-big company is not about algorithms and data structures, it is about coping with and recovering from environment breakages, and having the skills to diagnose and fix the environments that you were forced to adopt last quarter and by this quarter are deprecated.

Historically, 90% of my Indian coworkers have had a much higher pain threshold than 90% of my domestic teammates. I can think of two individuals with a low tolerance for bullshit and I always wonder how they fit in socially over there.

I have to dig a lot or try to bring a problem into N.A. office hours before I see how much rote work is required to do a task and it’s almost always shockingly high. We write software for a living. Nobody should be running a static run book. We should be converting it to code.

I’ve often suspected it’s a job security thing.

Keep in mind how immense income disparities are there. For someone living in India, getting a job that exists anywhere at all on the US payscale pretty much guarantees living comfortably and being able to save tons of money on top of that.

The problem applies to any pair of sites with a 12-hour timezone offset, regardless of culture. PDT<->IST happens to be the one that practically occurs for Bay Area tech companies.

It kind of makes sense for EST+IST teams but PST+IST makes no goddamned sense at all.

There is no time of day when you can hold a meeting that doesn't piss absolutely everyone off. There are only times when you piss one group off more than the other.