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Love your customers

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: Love your customers

#21

Post by neilv »

eduction wrote: post #7

I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.” How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

That's a tricky one for public writing discretion. The Sun and Broadcom connections add to the point. Something a person with that background said was surprising. And the exact wording in one of the quotes was relevant.

I don't know whether I would've identified the person. As a principal-ish engineer and early startup person, who interacts with teams and all up and down the org charts of companies, it's important that people trust me. One part of that is to show discretion when entrusted with information. It's nuanced.

I have some WTF quotes and situations from recent interviews that I've decided not to share. The most recent one I did share was relatively mild, and I decided to paraphrase what the out-of-line person said, and be reasonably confident the person couldn't be identified. The incubator mentioned is harder to obscure, and is relevant to some people, so I tried to find a reasonable balance, but they should know who they are and be able to take some criticism, so I didn't worry much about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415495

Re: Love your customers

#22

Post by orochimaaru »

bcantrill wrote: post #16
eduction wrote: post #7

I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.” How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest,…

If you have a field engineering org that can move these players off of VMWare into Oxide (the software and monitoring, etc.), you could be looking at easy picking of VMWare customers.

Re: Love your customers

#23

Post by eduction »

bcantrill wrote: post #16
eduction wrote: post #7

I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.” How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest,…

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer?

Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?

I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.

Re: Love your customers

#24

Post by bcantrill »

eduction wrote: post #23
bcantrill wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest,…

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer? Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly? I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouth…

Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers, full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of their customers. (I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.)

Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer.

Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?

Re: Love your customers

#25

Post by amarghose »

Centigonal wrote: post #9

Love you Bryan, but: > Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit. Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure. I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a…

Literally clicked to the comments to say exactly this. While I agree with the overall sentiment of the piece, this statement destroys the author's credibility.

Re: Love your customers

#27

Post by shimman »

charcircuit wrote: post #26

>suing your customers is gross It's not gross, lawsuits are how you keep both parties honest. If you never sue your customers you are letting them walk over you and exploit you.

Nothing increases NPS like threatening to sue people who want to give you money. :D

Re: Love your customers

#28

Post by throwaway010126 »

As someone who was at Oracle pre & post Sun acquisition, in sales of all roles (with a decade tenure there) … and then later at VMWare - Bryan lives in his own Reality Distortion and it’s quite unfortunate.

Engineering wise, brilliant.

But very much out of touch with reality.

Re: Love your customers

#29

Post by musicale »

bcantrill wrote: post #17
Centigonal wrote: post #9

Love you Bryan, but: > Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit. Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure. I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a…

Appreciate the love, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion here: Sun failed to endure not because it loved its customers, but to the contrary because it lost track of them: the company was disinterested in the mechanics of running a business.[0] As for Oracle and its putative endurance, I would liken it to the Berlin Wall: despite the seeming permanence, it is in fact an artifact that history will be eager…

Per above, it seems like Sun had a core architectural, technical, and engineering failure with SPARC failing to keep pace with x86, and a business failure dealing with the fallout:

> x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)

> we spent too much time trying to help save microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation (UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah"

In contrast, HP mostly (though it eventually split into two companies) managed to survive Itanium and compete with Dell. IBM continued to evolve Power and its other architectures and still sells AIX as well as Linux systems. Cray still exists as part of HPE. Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 before hitting a home run with their own version of ARM.

In an alternate timeline, I imagine Sun still existing as an independent company and being the leader in RISC-V systems. But I guess Oxide is something of a successor?

Re: Love your customers

#30

Post by wmf »

throwaway010126 wrote: post #28

As someone who was at Oracle pre & post Sun acquisition, in sales of all roles (with a decade tenure there) … and then later at VMWare - Bryan lives in his own Reality Distortion and it’s quite unfortunate. Engineering wise, brilliant. But very much out of touch with reality.

You're not conveying much information here. What is he doing wrong?
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