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Tools you’d miss if you left a company

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#61

Post by nbm »

tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

It takes a few hours to learn to use the tools mentioned in the article (and many similar ones) to a level of competence - part of the appeal is how easy they are to use. It takes a few hours to learn how to get new data into and out of them as well. Both are the sort of thing taught in 45 minutes presentations and workshops during the Bootcamp training at FB, and then most people can just explore the rest themselves over time in normal usage.

What takes months is feeling like you understand the most important tools and aspects of the environment to be as effective in them as those around you, or to match how you felt in an environment where the scope is smaller. It’s not like you’re sitting in classes for months - you’re doing your job (maybe even more effectively than normal due to the availability of these tools), but every once in a while you’re encountering something where you need to ask someone else or explore or watch a video about how to do something, and that might break your momentum.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#62

Post by yibg »

Nothing wrong with writing glue, if that’s what the business / company / market needs.

Having said that, I do miss the data that’s available at FAANG companies (at least ones I’ve been at). I could dig up all sorts of system and business data, and really get good insight into both what my application and the users are doing. Tends to lead to a lot better and more clear decisions and thus helps to build the right thing.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#63

Post by yibg »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #46
bradleyjg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very large engineering organizations like Facebook, Netflix, etc. > If you're at a mega-corp with a huge engineering staff: Netflix is an odd choice for number two on a list of two. I’d guess it has an order of magnitude fewer engineers than Facebook. So what’s the rough cutoff here? 1000 software engineers?

I chose it as an example of a company that is unusually resource-intensive (in compute, network usage, storage, etc.) for how many engineers they have, so it can make sense to spend engineering more engineering resources on infrastructure than other similarly-sized orgs.

Of the FAANG companies i think Netflix builds the least of their own stuff. Still a lot more than smaller companies do and should but they tend to only build their own if there isn’t something suitable out there.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#64

Post by nostrebored »

lainga wrote: post #55
tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

Given the background of the blog's author, I wouldn't hold my breath

What, a successful engineer with tenure at two of the most successful business operating at scale?

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#65

Post by meddlepal »

packetslave wrote: post #48
lidHanteyk wrote: post #22

I prefer Kubernetes and Prometheus to Borg and Borgmon. Better interoperability, portability, and documentation. Does any other Xoogler have thoughts on this? The author didn't mention it, but I also prefer Capn to Proto3.

Kubernetes has a lot going for it, but it isn't (yet) anywhere close to Borg in terms of scalability. 5000 maximum hosts in a cluster is a drop in the bucket for a Borg cluster. Google was publicly talking about 10,000 machines as the median size almost 5 years ago. As for Prometheus, I like the rules engine VERY much (unsurprising, since they basically reimplemented borgmon, there). I'd take Viceroy any day over Gra…

I have deep experience with operating Kubernetes and no experience with Google's Borg but I imagine Borg is significantly more challenging to operate? Kubernetes is designed to be a workload scheduler that a three or four person team can operate.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#66

Post by bgdnyxbjx »

This topic is one of the primary reasons I enjoy working at MS these days.

The tech stack is full of OSS or industry standard tools, not a bunch of internal NIH things.

My current stack is: React, Node, Kubernetes, Linux (for dev and deploy), Git for sc, GitHub, vs code.

I can’t even think of some internal tool that I depend on at the moment.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#67

Post by kelnos »

I'm always so disappointed that we're all so closed when it comes to tooling. It's fortunate that some tools get open-sourced, but it's also astounding the amount of time and money that is wasted building the same tools over and over at each company.

Sure, sometimes paying for a hosted solution for your CI, deployments, container platform, data pipeline, etc. isn't the most ideal route, depending on your business, but I'd much rather focus on building actual product over reinventing the deployment system wheel for the Nth time.

> People from Google probably miss Borg (and lament the whole Kubernetes thing) or BigTable.

I've never worked at Google, and thus have no experience with Borg, but Kubernetes is exactly what I want to see companies open-sourcing, or, if they must, selling. I don't see what there is to lament. Being able to start a new company and not have to reinvent and rebuild your own deployment/container platform is a huge gift.

For the most part I find this blog to be insightful and fun to read, but this post IMO completely misses the mark. Given that I think the author works a lot on the operations side of the house, I guess I'm not surprised. Internal platform tools are there to serve the needs of the product teams; they don't exist just to make someone feel good about their ability to build something instead of buying instead, which she unfairly looks down on so disdainfully, as if it's not real engineering. Part of doing engineering is putting your ego aside when it's more cost-effective and robust to use someone else's solution instead of rolling your own.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#68

Post by kelnos »

barrkel wrote: post #23
wpeterson wrote: post #17

This article is dangerous in romanticizing the “not invented here” culture at many big tech companies and seems rooted more in the 90s than present day. The world of open source tooling and easily re-usable SAAS offerings means everyone has access to the best tools, whether you’re a small startup or a big company. Anyone who longs for internal, corporate tooling baffles me when they can use things that actually have…

The mistake you're making is thinking that the public tools are the best tools. There are reasons that make them the best for many, if not most, companies: more investment, more mindshare, easier to hire employees with prior experience, and so on. But there are also costs in having a wobbly stack of glued together stuff, especially if the parts aren't quite right for your goal. Sometimes the best tool is more focused…

Where I work, the majority of our tools were built in-house, mainly because we started (2008) before there were good open source or even paid options for most of it all. As good options started to appear, we found that we couldn't adopt them, because there was a mismatch in concepts/fundamentals between what we'd built and what was out there. We've evaluated a lot of things, and for many of them, we end up realizing that integrating them with our systems would require a hard fork, and so we'd lose most of the benefit of using it.

Frankly, it sucks. Our tools are mostly very good, but it took us a long time to get there, and the internal fights over getting funding to really invest in our internal platform have been exhausting for all involved. I get that it's not zero work or zero time to use something off the shelf, but as someone who has been playing in the grass on the other side of that particular fence, it takes a lot of work to keep that grass green.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#69

Post by bagacrap »

tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

Tools aside, Google's software systems are extremely complex and understanding them well enough to make effective contributions can take some engineers a long time. I doubt most people take 5 months to get basic proficiency in the average project, though. It's a "fact" that's repeated to take the pressure off new hires.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#70

Post by godot »

kelnos wrote: post #67

I'm always so disappointed that we're all so closed when it comes to tooling. It's fortunate that some tools get open-sourced, but it's also astounding the amount of time and money that is wasted building the same tools over and over at each company. Sure, sometimes paying for a hosted solution for your CI, deployments, container platform, data pipeline, etc. isn't the most ideal route, depending on your business, bu…

I feel like the author's point and your point would be applicable a lot more say 5 to 8 years ago. There has been so many SaaS startups in the past 8 years or so where many things that used to require intense internal tooling are now available as a SaaS.
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