SVB has a ton of bonds that mature (will be cashable) after ten years, but nobody wants to pay for them today because they can make more money placing their cash in a savings account. For a silly analogy, imagine if you had a bunch of cash locked up in a CD, but also had a surprise medical bill. Our parents could very easily look at your books and say “huh, I can advance you 80% of your CD because there is really no chance the CD won’t pay me back once it matures.” Is this a bailout? I don’t think so. It’s different than paying off our drunk uncle’s gambling debts for the 7th time.
And also we probably don’t want to say “haha silly SVB customers, they can wait ten years to get their money back” because none of us want to live in a world where most Americans, most of whom don’t understand all these complexities, start runs on ALL the banks because they think this is the start of a collapse. It becomes self-fulfilling at that point.
In terms of real dollars, those bonds will be worth less in 10 years because of inflation.
You’re correct in highlighting that if they fronted the cash now the bonds would be less, but it is simultaneously true that they will be worth less “2023 dollars” in 10 years.
Treasury bonds are not irresponsible. What is irresponsible is to not hedge your interest rate risk in the form of interest rate swaps. Most other conventional banks do exactly that; they have a portfolio of held-to-maturity (HTM) securities that they hedge with interest rate swaps to avoid bearing that risk. In the financial sector, you only leave unhedged the investments you are _actually_ betting on; if you are to say that they were betting on 10y bonds (until maturity) holding the same value as the day they bought them, without any form of risk management, I would consider that irresponsible.
Its not as clear as treasuries are safe or not. The price function is clearly dependent on term.
long term treasuries are extremely risky assets, by definition and move a lot on interest rates. whereas short term treasuries like less than three momths barely move on fed rates, hence much safer.
Svb bank made the wrong choice of holding super long duration treasuries. They knew what they were getting into, and did it anyway for higher yield at that time. they could have put the money in 3 month expirations and wouldnt have been in this situation.
If you're a bank that can't differentiate/navigate long term vs short term debts while experiencing ballooning deposits, then yes I agree it's time to jump ship and find a new profession.
I don't see how the US economy is to blame for the actions of a greedy monoculture based on "tech line go up". They made a long term bet on bonds with historically low interest rates, doubling down that the party would continue indefinitely. They didn't have a chief risk officer for 9 months! How is that the US economy's fault?
There's a reason they lobbied congress to weaken risk regulations.
Rails can easily serve up pages in <100ms. If you do have an endpoint that is CPU-bound to where you can’t meet your SLA goals, you can serve up just that endpoint in Rust or Golang. But that’s rare.
Usually what happens at scale is that the SQL database starts slowing down as more data is loaded in. Partitioning, indexes and painful refactorings aren’t prioritized. Engineering will champion “a faster language”—that incidentally allows them a new data model where they add in proper indexes at the start. They aren’t really incentivized to realize they could see the same gains by just improving their existing data inside the Rails monolith.
Source: experience improving performance (including latency) with multi-billion-dollar Rails monoliths
There’s vanishingly few businesses that need <25ms. What business did you have in mind? Outside of trading , which yea of course that’s the wrong choice.
I'm talking about the scalability of actually delivering new code to servers (or "serverless" runtimes). Feature flags don't help with that.
Admittedly, it isn't a scalability problem you will run into right away.
But when you need to roll out an emergency fix, there is a big difference between deploying to thousands of servers that all have everything, and ten servers running a single service.
> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels.
Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.
I don't know your culture or your boss, but I have worked with people who could not code their way out of a paper bag, and round-robbined there way through DMs to "pair" to complete their assigned work. These people were highly paid and highly damaging to productivity and morale. I suspect I'm not alone, and I'll freely admit I have a large amount of bias in how I perceive your arguments due to that.
I will also say that your mentioned group chats should probably be a team channel, and the responsibility then becomes the Team Manager if the team members don't step up on their own. "#team-channel: @BobTeamManager are you able to help here?" would get a specific team member assigned.
Factorio has provided a sandbox for me to visualize and acquire skills on managing bottlenecks in data flows; skills that I have and am applying as the point software engineer to resolve critical bottlenecks in multiple e-commerce systems. I won't speculate as to the commercial value of resolving those data bottlenecks here, but whatever dollar number you're imagining is, I suspect, probably missing multiple zeroes.
Worth mentioning: 1000 hours over the last six years that Factorio has been released comes out to about 27 minutes per day, on average.
1000 hours since release in 2020 comes out to about 1 hour and 22 minutes per day on average.
Regardless of whatever "benefits" Factorio might have to society as a whole, one and a half hours a day of recreation sounds completely reasonable to me.
I've played about 100 hours of Factorio and have often wondered if it's approaches can be generalized beyond the game. Does anyone beside the poster above believe they are?
There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis.
The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.
Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.
For example, when I started my current job about 10 years ago, the company had around 115 employees, and me and my three colleagues were THE software development team at the company. You need some kind of automation? You went to us. Oh, and we also built the internal CMDB and all the tooling
Now, there are 450+ employees, my team has ~8 developers, and there are more development teams, with different purposes and scopes.
Colleagues still come to us when they have development needs, and quite often we have to tell them "that's out of scope of what we do these days" (and hopefully point them somewhere else who can help them). Not because we don't want to be helpful, but because we're already overrun with work that's very clearly in scope for us, and that our department lead prioritized for us.
What does that have to do with support? It creates incentives to say "not our job". Back in the days, if a customer had a tricky problem, support might involve us in the solution. Now, we have to decline unless it's likely a problem with our corner of the software. Which means support staff has to chase for other responsible engineers / experts.
So the small company from 10 years probably had much better support experience, at least in cases where support cases couldn't be resolved by first-level support.
There are more reasons: our whole software landscape was much smaller, so an average support person could be familiar with a larger part of it.
You don't need intentional design for stability to create a maze that support has to traverse.
Because many, and arguably most, corporations have grown too large to be sustainable owing to overly aggressive adoption of digital technologies paired alongside generous investment and financial policy that has assumed infinite growth (fueled by infinite consumption) as the goal, which is breaking down only so absurdly because we went from "We have branches in 3 different cities!" to "I have a business with a 1/3rd of the human species as my customers. Neato." rather too quickly.
In less wordy words: Imagine you have 1 million customers. And 95% are satisfied per year. And 90% of those unsatisfied customers are able to be satisfied through the regular channels. These numbers don't seem awful, but at scale everything breaks. That's a total of 50,000 unsatisfied customers per year and 5,000 who are unable to achieve a satisfactory outcome through the regular channels.
And that's with only with 1 million customers - practically a mom 'n pop shop by the modern mantra of growth at literally any cost. Consequently, you end up with a large number of customers who have irreconciled issues when going through the normal channels, unless you approach 100% effectiveness which will never happen - as peak possible customer satisfaction is only going to decrease in proportion to scale.
So you end up in a scenario where accepting an increasingly large number of discontented customers just becomes a normal part of business at scale. But of course this will also lead to the downfall of those accepting this. Because customers, and citizens, once slighted - tend to remember it.
There is a point in every company’s growth where employees stop caring about the product or the company and only care about the mini game of staying employed and meeting KPIs while combating every other team wanting your team to be the one that has to work extra hours.
Part of the problem is we use unintentionally vague terms like "performance." What does that mean? Bandwidth? Reliability? Scalability? Something we can fix later right? That's what all executives and—frankly—most engineers hear.
I only ever talk about "latency." Latency is time—you can't get latency back once you've spent it.
That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.
And also we probably don’t want to say “haha silly SVB customers, they can wait ten years to get their money back” because none of us want to live in a world where most Americans, most of whom don’t understand all these complexities, start runs on ALL the banks because they think this is the start of a collapse. It becomes self-fulfilling at that point.