bcantrill
Joined 16 years ago
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http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc
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Comment · 21 days ago
If it's of any solace, the feeling is almost assuredly mutual: your hypothetical candidate materials at Oxide would likely reveal that you are more interested in picking fights than solving problems. So you would likely not be welcomed at Oxide simply because you wouldn't make the cut -- quite aside from whatever social grievances you may foster.
Comment · 21 days ago
Yes, it is normal, especially at the salary that we pay (currently $275K). To take but one domain: at that salary, you are (roughly) at the level of a school superintendent for a school district with thousands of students (like, large town/small city). If you have ever been associated with hiring someone in that kind of position, you will see a VERY time intensive process, with many hours of interviews with many stakeholders. So yes, we have an intensive process -- but we take hiring very seriously, and we believe that it shows in our extraordinary team.
Comment · 22 days ago
Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.
The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])
Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...
Comment · 22 days ago
Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)
I'm not sure why people are indexing so hard on the interviews, as we matriculate very few candidates into conversations; if you want to complain about something, complain about the written nature of our hiring process.[0]
Comment · 22 days ago
Well, in this case it was actually literally paying our taxes. (In the photo, Steve is about to initiate a wire to the IRS.) At our size, it's not a check -- and certainly not a credit card.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
Comment · 1 month ago
You're snidely dismissing the obstacles as being restricted to _today_, projecting into an arbitrary future to the point of being science fiction, and then complaining about "smug hand-waving"?
Comment · 1 month ago
I have long since accepted that this one is going to follow me to the grave, and I have (repeatedly?) expressed remorse over it,[0] but if you want to hear a longer discussion about this, Ryan Peterman asked me about this very directly on his podcast and we had a good conversation about it.[1]
Comment · 1 month ago
Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our sales folks are so good that they sold Solaris 2.3 on Viking!"), and I always personally got along very well with them. I was happy to be put in front of customers, and they were happy to use me -- and some of my fondest memories were with sales folks in some of the geographies which were particularly strong (shout out to Sun Canada, Sun Australia, and to the Wall Street and Itasca offices in the US).
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
[0] https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
Comment · 1 month ago
Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved problem!). Stay tuned!
Comment · 1 month ago
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Comment · 1 month ago
I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
Comment · 1 month ago
Saying that we don't need to fear human extinction in the next ten years (or even the next hundred?) does not feel like an extraordinary claim?
Comment · 1 month ago
I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here).
And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.
Comment · 1 month ago
And in that piece, I think I explained why it's important to take it seriously even though (and in fact, because!) it's self-reported?
Comment · 1 month ago
Interesting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "likely robot." Looking further back in time (and taking a somewhat random example), a blog entry from 2008, "Concurrency's Shysters"[0], is also deemed as similarly confidently robot (also 97 out of 100); do you expect this high a false positive rate?
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/03/concurrencys-shyster...