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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

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Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#31

Post by neallindsay »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #24
potato3732842 wrote: post #11

I love when I run across minor versions of these sort of archeology projects in the course of my job. Git makes it a lot easier though.

Git is only 19 years old, I suspect the bigger problems in this area are more likely to be 30+ year old, as most of the people who built such systems are likely to be retired.

Some git repos were ported over from SVN repos that were migrated from CVS. I never migrated anything into CVS, so I don't know if that was common at the time. But there are a lot of git repos out there with commits older than git itself (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is the most prominent example).

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#32

Post by btrettel »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #30

>Unfortunately, the internal team doesn't know what the secrets are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related patents. I'm confused about how something can be both a secret and patented. Isn't the point of a patent that it is public and no longer secret?

I was confused by the same thing. I guess that the patents are only related, and don't actually contain the trade secrets.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#33

Post by MichaelZuo »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #27
relaxing wrote: post #3

A while back there was a discussion about employee retention and churn, with some parties claiming a complete staff turnover over some period was a good thing, and that documentation could serve as the complete institutional memory. I hope they read this.

Three problems with documentation. Sometimes it doesn't exist, sometimes you can't find it, and sometimes you don't read it. Well I guess the fourth problem is it could be wrong, but that just comes with the territory.

There could be a fifth problem too, it shouldn’t be referenced.

Because it was compiled incorrectly by someone/some group without sufficient permission to do so, so referring to it would lead to corporate politiking.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#34

Post by sevensor »

weinzierl wrote: post #2

"[...] our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with few in between." We will be seeing this with nuclear soon. The only people I know that studied nuclear engineering or related fields are in their 60s. The renaissance of nuclear will put these people in high demand and a fresh cohort of young people will be drawn into it.

I know lots of mid career nuke Es. They have great jobs. Programming, industrial automation, carpentry, middle management. Not, you know, reactor design or operation, as those aren’t jobs that exist.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#35

Post by cesarb »

> The alien machinery hums along, producing polymers. [...] The more I look around, the more the engineering world, once you go back more than a few years, looks like subterranean New York City. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples

These sentences made me think of the game Factorio. For those who don't know, in the original game (before the recent Space Age expansion) the official objective was to build and launch a rocket, leaving behind the still running automated factory which produced the parts for that rocket (and yes, one of the intermediate products is polymers, simplified in the game as "Plastic"). One can imagine someone, much later, encountering the long abandoned factory, still running and still producing polymers.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#36

Post by jahabrewer »

weinzierl wrote: post #2

"[...] our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with few in between." We will be seeing this with nuclear soon. The only people I know that studied nuclear engineering or related fields are in their 60s. The renaissance of nuclear will put these people in high demand and a fresh cohort of young people will be drawn into it.

This doesn't smell quite right. For me, it wasn't uncommon to run in to NRE majors at college 15 years ago.

(now maybe they all work at NRC, I'll give you that)

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#37

Post by cesarb »

neallindsay wrote: post #31
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is only 19 years old, I suspect the bigger problems in this area are more likely to be 30+ year old, as most of the people who built such systems are likely to be retired.

Some git repos were ported over from SVN repos that were migrated from CVS. I never migrated anything into CVS, so I don't know if that was common at the time. But there are a lot of git repos out there with commits older than git itself (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is the most prominent example).

> But there are a lot of git repos out there with commits older than git itself (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is the most prominent example).

No, the official Linux kernel repository is only as old as git itself (being one of the first three projects using git, the other two being sparse and git itself); the older history of the kernel was deliberately not imported into it. There are later repositories which did import the previous Linux kernel history from Bitkeeper and older tarballs and patches, using mechanisms such as graft to tie together these historical commits and the new ones, but the result has never been part of the main repository.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#38

Post by zellyn »

zetx wrote: post #14

If someone wanted to be such an archeologist but instead for figuring out how some code or project worked (where perhaps the only remaining thing was the compiled code and some limited documentation), what sort of role/position would that be? To my mind it just seems like something one would get assigned or throw into when looking into improving a process similar to the company in this story, but perhaps I am missing…

My only-mostly-joking answer is that you can go work for a typical Silicon Valley style technology company, and stay around for two or three four-year vesting periods. Most of them have Google-influenced design doc processes, and few if any have a process for documenting what actually got built, much less what it eventually turned into.

One of my hobbies is feeling dumb for not understanding something, being willing to ask, realizing _nobody_ knows the big picture, and trying to document it.

tbh though I have also occasionally fantasized about finding a job that was _only_ software archeology.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#39

Post by Kinrany »

cesarb wrote: post #35

> The alien machinery hums along, producing polymers. [...] The more I look around, the more the engineering world, once you go back more than a few years, looks like subterranean New York City. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples These sentences made me think of the game Factorio. For those who don't know, in the original game (before the recent S…

I wish there was a game that did this on purpose. You are given an undocumented alien half-broken contraption and your goal is to repurpose it for something different.

Space Station 13 was a little bit like that sometimes.

Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)

#40

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

neallindsay wrote: post #31
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is only 19 years old, I suspect the bigger problems in this area are more likely to be 30+ year old, as most of the people who built such systems are likely to be retired.

Some git repos were ported over from SVN repos that were migrated from CVS. I never migrated anything into CVS, so I don't know if that was common at the time. But there are a lot of git repos out there with commits older than git itself (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is the most prominent example).

That's true actually, I'd forgotten about that possibility. I believe that FBs monorepo was originally in Subversion and that codebase turned 20 this year.
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