I only ever want stuff I can limp along standalone with until we find something to replace it with. I got seriously burned by a small SaaS help desk app about 15 years ago. Turns out they had three customers, no investors and were burning $20k a month on operational expenditure

That's one problem with a fixed on call rate that some organisations offer. It's a hefty chunk of cash and sounds generous to the engineers. But the cost is already known and sunk up front and not proportional to the amount of call outs so the business sees it as a fixed operational expenditure rather than an appraisal of how fucked things are.

The performance metric quickly becomes how many people you still have on cover who haven't quit to work somewhere else because they are burned out.

If you want people to be engaged, delivering content that respects them is the only step. Engagement measurement and mechanics that interfere with that only serve to reduce that respect.

I’d rather actually we used postfix notation as that not ambiguous at all. I would like a modern “dc” written in Go if I’m honest. With engineering units, BCD decimal arithmetic, blackjack and hookers.

Actually if there was a postfix notation spreadsheet with that capability it would be an interesting tool.

I’m super happy though as the kids stayed with me :)

"I am declining this as it is not fitting with the direction of the project and other users' requirements. You are free to fork it and maintain your own version"

I eventually moved to software at which point I discovered that it's even worse here. It's at least 10^6x more difficult to kill people though and you usually don't have to get off your chair to undo the carnage.