[nunez]

Couldn't be more on the nose.

Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now).

The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.

[tombert]

Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness.

There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that we can’t do something because we would have to learn something new. I got into several arguments because I wanted to rewrite some buggy mutex-heavy code (that kept getting me paged in the middle of the night) with ZeroMQ, and people acted like learning it was some insurmountable challenge. My response would usually be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we were engineers, and that we had the ability to learn new things”.

As I said, complaints about my attitude weren’t completely unfounded, but it’s just immensely frustrating for people using their unwillingness to learn new things as an excuse to keep some code in a broken state.

[jmalicki]

You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.

[tombert]

I didn’t want to rewrite everything in ZeroMQ. I wanted to rewrite one 2000 line service with ZeroMQ because the service was already broken and I was the only person who was dealing with the consequences because I was the only person who got paged for that particular service.

Usually I advocated for doing things a more boring way, and I certainly don’t agree with making every damn thing an “initiative”, which was my biggest issue at BigCo.

I don’t think it’s inconsistent. I wanted to use the right tool for the right job. Usually I can get by with Java’s built in tooling, and that was my initial attempt at a rewrite, but I ended up trying to re-invent a bunch of concurrency patterns with BlockingQueue and I found that literally everything I was spending a lot of (my own free) time was handled in like four lines of ZeroMQ.

I have a single line on my resume for ZeroMQ as a keyword, despite having used it in many, many projects, so it certainly wasn’t using explicitly to pad my resume.

[FourierSerious]

If @tombert worked for me at BigCo, I'd give them a big raise for doing the exact right thing. This is Employee of the Year performance.

@tombert recognized that the homegrown tech was awful (*) and proposed a mature, reliable, well documented and supported, low-cost, utterly mainstream and mature replacement. That's not resume packing, that's pragmatic, rational software design.

@tombert also knows that every tech professional must routinely learn new things, otherwise they'll be unemployable dinosaurs long before retirement age. Tech dinosaurs aren't a pretty thing in the workplace.

(*) Especially awful because these are mutex and concurrency bugs, and @tombert knew that nondeterministic bugs cost expensive resources to investigate, find, and fix, simply because these bugs are unreproducible. Unlike straightforward deterministic bugs, concurrency bugs are open-ended tar pits that managers and engineers despise. These kind of bugs can eat up a project's schedule and energy.

edited: formatting bug. Fortunately it was reproducible!

[tombert]

I mean, obviously I agree with my own perspective :), but I do kind of understand the pushback to a certain extent.

Of course there are an effectively infinite number of potential routes you can go down with software, and of course you can't learn all of them, and you can't import every single helper library you'd like to.

We all like to think that the way we want to do things is objectively the best way, and I do think that there are objectively better ways of doing some things involving concurrency and the like, but a lot of the time it is subjective.

But as you said, I wasn't trying to import a library that was the latest hype on Hacker News; it's ZeroMQ. It's fast, well documented, easy to use, and very mature software with very good libraries in every major programming language, and it implements nearly every concurrency pattern that you'd want to use for most projects, and importantly it implements them correctly, which can be harder to do than it sounds.

As I said, I did have an attitude problem at that point in my career. I can blame it on a lot of stuff (untreated sleep apnea being a big one, as I later discovered), but I will admit I probably could have and should have been a bit more diplomatic in how I proposed these things.

I didn't really blame the person who wrote the code for it breaking (who had since left the company), because writing correct concurrent software is hard, I'm sure he had a reason at the time for doing it the way that he did, and of course all non-trivial software has bugs. What bothered me is that I had been designated at the sole person to deal with these issues, so I was the only person who had to deal with the consequences with these actions. The code hadn't been touched by anyone in years outside of adding basic NPE checks, and so I felt like people should let me try and fix it in a way that I thought would be less error-prone, and if it breaks I'd be the one forced to fix it anyway, and I could feature flag the hell out of it in case my code didn't work.

[FourierSerious]

> it implements nearly every concurrency pattern that you'd want to use for most projects, and importantly it implements them correctly, which can be harder to do than it sounds.

This is key. Writing nontrivial and bug-free concurrent code is extremely hard, it's like writing absolutely solid crypto code. Both look easy, both are incredibly hard and anyone who doesn't know that, shouldn't be writing code at those layers.

Recommending a proven, off-the-shelf concurrency technology is the mark of an experienced and thoughtful software architect.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I think i found something even better. I'm just adjacent to the big money maker. We keep folks on the page a little longer but don't need to concern ourselves with revenue and ads. Just make it good so folks stick around but important enough that we won't get axed.

[locknitpicker]

> Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (...)

You're basically stating that people who are hired to staff projects that are superfluous secondary moonshots are more likely to be fired than those who maintain core business areas. That's stating the obvious. When a company goes through spending cuts, the first things to go are the money sinks and fluff projects that are not in any key roadmap. This is also why some companies structure their whole orgs around specific projects and even project features, because management limits the impact of getting rid of entire teams by framing that as killing projects or delays in roadmap.