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How does private equity businesses operating better improve our retirement savings? Wont they just improve the PE fund performance and benefit only the investors ?I am genuinely curious as its very difficult to find public information on how they actually function

In my 20 years of engineering, all my distributed systems knowledge was learnt in a period of two years under two amazing engineers working in two failed startups

One was like those legendary OG dogmatic distributed systems software engineer that you can meet and the other was an OG data platform person. They have zero social media presence but they have guaranteed jobs whomever they call.

I learnt my transactions and services from engineer 1 and my analytic/data platform fundamentals from engineer 2

I have made more money in the enterprise land but I think the two failed startups did 10x more to help me grow as an engineer

I am rather confident that an AI cannot come close to what I do and my management knows that

Why is this sloppy. The author is not saying that AI is bad but that the current capital being invested in the UD is mostly betting on AI.

If you remove AI then what is left?

   you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.

Product support is an integral part of enterprise software engineering. Product management does not know what adding a new feature or deprecating an old feature means. It is the responsibility of engineering to provide the dependency matrix.

For example, engineering usually tells product, if you change feature A, then it will also affect feature B, C and Z. Otherwise you may end up with contract breaches and SLA violations.

Product lifetime and providing incremental features is a big reason why SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space and people still pay a lot of money to buy them.

Google is not a good example to look at if you are thinking about enterprise software as these need to be supported long term and Google is not very good at that. They have a history of making breaking changes and discontinuing products.

Microsoft is a much better example for business software as they are (were?) paranoid about backward compatibility.

Thanks! It was a really sweet deal for the founder as he left as far as I know and I suspect for their direct reports as well.

Its been a while but it still brings out some bitterness. I did leave after an year but the damage had been done by then.

Maybe PE firms are ok and mine was an extreme example but I got burned pretty badly. If I do have to work on a place backed by a PE firm for some reason, I would start out as a contractor and then see how it plays out before committing to be a full time employee.

That is funny as the exact thing happened in my startup as well (we were one of the roll-ees) We got some suits sent by the PE after the funding round.They politely said that they had other plans when we invited them for lunch.

I have firsthand experience of how PE ruins startups. We were a small startup and unfortunately our founder decided to go with a PE firm rather than a VC firm for a round of funding. The latter were upfront about job cuts but the PE firm did not say anything until them took over. The founder got a good paycheck but we were left holding the bag.

There was a bloodbath and they ruined the culture, the product and the morale. I never realized the meaning of a "cutthroat" culture until that time. It was personally the most stressful period of my employment.

From then on, the moment that I see PE mentioned anywhere, I know its time to run.

How is this different from a standard enterprise service bus style architecture using ActiveMQ or Kafka ?

By definition, microservices are independent of stack. Every service in theory can have its own stack. My recommendation would be to stick with microservices but start migrating each service to modern stack. With regards to the stack, you can look at Django if you want to move to a python based ecosystem, Spring boot for java and node if you want to look at server side js backed by a classic RDBMS like MySql or Postgres

Internet Protocols. Specifically the beauty and simplicity of IPv4