Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
interviewing senior security engineers
Or maybe senior security engineers from 10 years ago were somewhat different from (wannabee senior) security engineers today?
Did you ask them to write 0xD6 in decimal?
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I'm a very good engineer, but so much of my time is consumed fighting with Tekton pipelines and migrating testing frameworks and versions I barely have time to write code. But that's because I can figure that stuff out when I have to. All the code is written by the people who can't figure that stuff out.
Why this isn't two separate jobs I can't understand. Let me do some stuff I'm good at rather than constantly fighting with things I'm not?
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interviewing senior security engineers
Or maybe senior security engineers from 10 years ago were somewhat different from (wannabee senior) security engineers today?
Did you ask them to write 0xD6 in decimal?
That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.
I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
Or maybe it's just a different skill set
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
Not to vibe check you homie, but are you asking these people about network layer security and they're having trouble with it?
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I'm a very good engineer, but so much of my time is consumed fighting with Tekton pipelines and migrating testing frameworks and versions I barely have time to write code. But that's because I can figure that stuff out when I have to. All the code is written by the people who can't figure that stuff out.
Why this isn't two separate jobs I can't understand. Let me do some stuff I'm good at rather than constantly fighting with things I'm not?
This hits the nail right on the head. The point of cloud services is to take away all the overheads of building and delivering software solutions that have nothing to do with the actual business problem I'm trying to solve.
If I want to get a new product to market, I want to spend most of my time making my core product better, more marketable, more efficient. I don't want to divert time and resources to just keep the lights on, like having to hire a whole bunch of people whose only jobs is to provision and manage servers and IT infrastructure (or nurse a Kubernetes cluster for that matter). Managing Kubernetes or physical tin servers is not what my business is about. All this tech infrastructure is a means to an end, not the end itself.
That's why cloud services is such a cost efficient proposition for 98% businesses. Hell, if I could run everything using a serverless model (not always possible or cost effective) I'd do it gladly.
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Or maybe it's just a different skill set
Not when the skillset is essentially outsourced and you are left consuming the product of that skillset.
Understanding is nonnegotiable in security, IMHO.
You can't fail to understand how signature attestation works, if you are implementing it, to make one example I made in the post. Otherwise you end up verifying the signature in the CI (like that person claimed it should be done) and waste the whole effort. You can definitely still outsource the whole infra and scripting to Github, but you still need to understand. The problem is that when you can outsource everything, at some point understanding becomes an extra step.
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This hits the nail right on the head. The point of cloud services is to take away all the overheads of building and delivering software solutions that have nothing to do with the actual business problem I'm trying to solve.
If I want to get a new product to market, I want to spend most of my time making my core product better, more marketable, more efficient. I don't want to divert time and resources to just keep the lights on, like having to hire a whole bunch of people whose only jobs is to provision and manage servers and IT infrastructure (or nurse a Kubernetes cluster for that matter). Managing Kubernetes or physical tin servers is not what my business is about. All this tech infrastructure is a means to an end, not the end itself.
That's why cloud services is such a cost efficient proposition for 98% businesses. Hell, if I could run everything using a serverless model (not always possible or cost effective) I'd do it gladly.
This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.
Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud.
Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I'm reminded of when my boss asked me whether our entry test was too hard after getting several submissions that wouldn't even run.
Sometimes prospective employees are just shit.
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That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.
I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...
You want to hire the "guru", not the "principal". You want to actually ask him to write 0xD6 in decimal, and if he dares to answer "Seriously? Come on now, that's boring", then you hire him on the spot.
But you can't hire only gurus. You need normal seniors, too. Build a normal team around one guru. Maybe build one ultra advanced team around 2-3 gurus, if you really need to invent new and hardcore difficult stuff.
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I'm reminded of when my boss asked me whether our entry test was too hard after getting several submissions that wouldn't even run.
Sometimes prospective employees are just shit.
Ahaha yes, that might be the case, but I started to lose hope if the top of the applicants (out of hundreds of rejected!) all exhibits this behavior. I can't help but feel that now we are looking for people with a mindset and skillset that is simply disappearing in the industry.
And as I said in another post, I perfectly acknowledge that if I stopped reading and investigating stuff on my own, I could absolutely keep my job by just mindlessly administering a few services and rephrasing CIS benchmarks...
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.
Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.
Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!
So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.
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That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.
Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.
Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!
So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.
That being said, I am genuinely frustrated by how little people know or care about the plumbing these days.
I am so fucking tired of seeing someone spin up 3 cloud databases for what could be a 40k in-memory hashtable.
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That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.
Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.
Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!
So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.
Mind you that my take and experience is specifically in the context of security.
I struggle to make the parallel that you suggest (which might work for some areas) with a security engineer.
Say, a person learned to brainlessly parrot that pods need to have setting x or z. If they don't understand them, they can't offer meaningful insight in cases where that's not possibile (which might be specific), they can't provide a solid risk analysis etc.
What is the counterpart to this gap?
Because I struggle to see it. Breadth of areas where this superficial knowledge is available is useless, IMHO. -
My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I think its actually that most people generally don't really understand most things beyond the minimal level necessary to get by. Now that the tech industry isn't just a bunch of nerds you're increasingly more likely to encounter people who are temperamentally disinclined to seek understanding of those details.
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That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.
I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...
I agree with your lack of affection for cloud services, but I think your view might be a little skewed here. Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic, or just gather years of experience fixing problems with the whole system that makes up the car?
I'm a Senior Systems engineer. I know very little about kernel programming or OS design, but i know how the packages and applications work together and where problems might arise in how they interact. Software Engineers might not know how or don't want to spend time to set up the infrastructure to host their applications, so they rely on me to do it for them, or outsource my job to someone else's computer.
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This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.
Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud.
Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.
I get you that it's easy to over-provision in the cloud, but you can't return an on-prem server. A cloud VM, just shut it down and you're done.
AWS talks about minimizing undifferentiated heavy lifting as a reason to adopt managed services and I find that largely to be true. The majority of companies aren't differentiating their services via some low-level technology advantage that allows them to cost less. It's a different purchasing model, a smoother workflow, or a unique insight into data. The value an organization provides to customers should be the primary focus of the business, the rest is a means to sharpen that focus.
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This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.
Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud.
Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.
At least where I work, our cloud team is ~35 people who manage the whole thing.
The datacenter team? In the hundreds.
Cloud is not the answer to every infra problem, but the flexibility, time to market, and lifecycle burden are easily beneficial weighed against finops. I’m an Azure engineer myself, it’s no comparison the benefits to a managed solution vs rolling your own DC for a lot of regular business workloads and solutions. Beyond that personally I’ve been able to skill up in areas I wouldn’t be able to otherwise if I was stuck troubleshooting bad cables, rebuilding a dead RAID array, or planning VMWare scaling nonsense.
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Mind you that my take and experience is specifically in the context of security.
I struggle to make the parallel that you suggest (which might work for some areas) with a security engineer.
Say, a person learned to brainlessly parrot that pods need to have setting x or z. If they don't understand them, they can't offer meaningful insight in cases where that's not possibile (which might be specific), they can't provide a solid risk analysis etc.
What is the counterpart to this gap?
Because I struggle to see it. Breadth of areas where this superficial knowledge is available is useless, IMHO.Because a security engineer focused on cloud would rightfully say "pod security is not my issue, I'm focused on protecting the rest of our world from each pod itself.". With AWS as example:
If they then analyze the IAM role structures and to deep into where the pod runs (e.g. shared ec2 vs eks) etc. then it would just be a matter of different focus.Cloud security is focused on the infrastructure - looks like you're looking for a security engineer focused on the dev side.
If they bring neither to the table then I'm with you - but I don't see how "the cloud" is at fault here... especially for security the world as full of "following the script" people long before cloud was a thing.
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My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I went through hiring several times at several companies, being on the interviewer side.
Typically it's not the talent pool as much as what the company has to offer and how much they're willing to pay. I referred top notch engineer friends, and they never made it past HR. A couple were rejected without interview because they asked too high of a salary, despite asking under market average. The rest didn't pass HR on personnality or not having all the "requirements", because the really good engineers are socially awkward and demand flexibility and are honest on the résumé/CV, or are self taught and barely have high-school graduation on there (just like me).
I've literally seen the case of: they want to hire another me, but ended up in a situation where: I wouldn't apply for the position myself, and even if I did, I wouldn't make it to the interview stage where I'd talk to myself and hire myself.
Naturally the candidates that did make it to me weren't great. Those are the people that do the bare minimum, have studied every test question (without understanding), vibe code everything, typically on the younger and very junior side. They're very good at passing HR, and very bad at their actual job.
It's not the technology, it's the companies that hire that ultimately steers the market and what people study for. Job requirements are ridiculous, HR hires engineers on personnality like they're shopping for yet another sales associate, now it takes 6 rounds of interviews for an entry level position at a startup. VC startups continue to pay wildly inflated wages to snatch all the top talent while established companies are laying off as much IT staff as possible to maximize profits.
