221–230 of 322 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a friend interview at "Big Nameless Corp" a few years ago. He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture. I always thought that was funny.
I don’t really see how that’s relevant given that WSL exists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On at least one occasion an employee posted on an internal discussion board that they were offended and quit out of what they considered basic defense of dignity and protocol. In terms of the whole group being gone in a week? Sure, at least one of those people were probably fired. I was really busy at this time so this is a highly subjective recollection based on my point of view and my interactions with others in pe…
To be clear then, it wasn't "essentialy every Apple employee in this position", it was one person who posted on a message board.
It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…
I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work…
> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means…
I've never worked in such an environment myself but I imagine it feels something like soldiers feel following a leader who feels like he knows what he's doing. It's the feeling of shared hardship and shared experience and it creates culture of driving to follow the leader. I imagine Elon Musk (at least used to, not sure if he still does) cause the same experience in employees. That's the sense you get when you read b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly just sounds like ... human organizations often get.
The iron law of bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered what the Iron Solution to Bureaucracy looks like. Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled off from the middle managers of the larger company, was pushed by Cla…
Some degree of bureaucracy is necessary and inevitable in any organization, as it's basically the glue that makes a group of people an organization. Imagine how difficult it'd be to collaborate on a project with even just one other person, if you didn't meet / pass notes / info on what each you were doing on the project, at least once. That process of passing info, is what constitutes bureaucracy, and bureaucrats act…
I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work…
> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means…
It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…
What do you look at in engineering culture?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee a…
You can make a very good case for any organization to replace Java => Go C++ => Rust The Database and System software that was created in 2000s very much was based on Java. But modern, performant Database and System software is written in Go/C++. https://landscape.cncf.io/