nbm

One thing to keep in mind for how development at larger tech companies works is that you’re often not building on your own desktop, you’re usually building on a development server that’s on a well-connected (effectively production-quality, if not literally the same) network. You don’t see a ton of drops in those cases, so it works well. Not that there hasn’t been effort to recover from networking issues encountered in this and other build tooling - at scale, someone’s development server is going to have a bad day every day.

You also need much better tools than grep and locate for a monorepo - or any sufficiently large repo probably. Just load the full repo into memory in a few places around the world, and use an API to find the text you’re looking for. If you already have expertise with search services in your company, this is not that challenging a step - and you can get fancy by using something like Tree-sitter to make those searches more advanced than text. Hitting disk (especially for whole directory trees for “grep -r”) is a losing approach in a large repo.

Since you mention a big tech company, what you’ll probably find is that there are people that care about these things around you, and they’re probably doing what they can and could do with support - not necessarily to do work, but also just moral support. (I like to pretend I’m one of those people in the quality space in my area in my big tech company…)

As others mention, be careful trying to change the world (and especially saying bad things about what you see) before you grow your credibility. But ask a few questions in team meetings (or, at something like FB, in workplace groups) about what test or staging or related infrastructure is available as part of ramping up, and that might get people that care to notice you’re a potential ally.

There’s even the (admittedly probably very) small chance that that the team wants to improve here, and doesn’t know how/didn’t have the resources to do better before - either way, you’ll learn more without alienating anyone.

Big tech companies also often offer mobility and culture variety, so keep your eye out for teams that align with what you care about. Learn what they do and how they got started at least - or possibly move there.

(If you’re at FB, feel free to reach out to me - same account name.)

Perhaps the right word is “system” - the combination of software (DNS protocol server software, health checker, BGP agent, and so forth) involved in making the DNS service available (or not, in this case). These could be running on the same computer, or separate ones if you are particularly imaginative.

Unfortunately, “DNS system” means something very different than if you said “load balancing system”, so “server” is simpler.

(Usual disclaimer: work at FB, even on this exact stuff, but not representing it.)

Stories (which is the medium used) about how things went right without effort are boring. Which leaves two stories - things that went right that had a lot of effort, and things that went wrong.

In the case of things going right with a lot of effort, there’s the case where things went right because of that effort. If you write stories about those, you can be accused of being self-aggrandizing - but they do give people practical options to consider in similar situations.

In the case of things going wrong, there’s the case where you tried to correct things, but were not successful. There’s value in exploring what you could do better - but that’s not a story. The story is the people and archetypes and systems and so forth. In that case, you can be accused of seeking to blame others.

The other stories could be where you did something wrong (but which at the time seemed like they were good and necessary), but despite that the outcome was successful, or because of that, the outcome was unsuccessful. If you’ve read enough of the back catalog, these do exist.

I like that these are presented as stories, and that they are representative of situations people will recognize and also find themselves in. If you’ve seen them, it’s validating that others perceive the challenges the same. If you haven’t, you’re forewarned about things that may come up.

Her stories gain a sharper edge if you’ve worked in similar sorts of environments before.

If you aren’t aware of how there are teams trying to “own” turf, and prevent alternatives (even one-offs), and also how the entire company tries to funnel anything that matches a keyword to that team, even when it is the most tentative match, then you aren’t aware of the challenges faced to navigate them.

You see one path (going with the flow), but don’t see what happens when you don’t follow it.

Not going with the flow is definitely valuable - it’s something any good senior person should have in their tool belt. And if you read Rachel’s stories, there are many examples of not going with the flow (and comments in the HN posts about how she’d be more effective if she didn’t go against the flow).

The challenge is that you can’t always go against the flow either. It’s celebrated if you cut through some red tape - but at some point you’ll just get a reputation of being contrary. Even if you don’t, it’s tiring to have to be the one trying to course-correct the world. Either way, you have to choose your battles. And a button on a dashboard probably isn’t worth using your capital on…

There’s a degree to which you can just go out and talk to people and build relationships. You’d be mistaken if you think that developing these relationships (as well as a reputation for solving real problems, which puts you on the right foot with many strong engineers) is an avenue that wasn’t explored.

At FB, most ICs are not hired for a specific team in advance, and instead choose between (for SWE, a long list of) teams during the Bootcamp process. You can chat to future team mates (not just manager or lead) and ask them straight out about that. (Some people also ask for the half-ly survey results for that team as well.)

If you’re being hired for a team specifically (at another company, say), ask for a “follow-up” meeting with future team mates after offer as a condition for accept. You have a lot of power at that point.

Keep in mind that the referenced paper that this page is based on is over a decade old now. Many things have changed since then, as you can imagine. Look for later papers and engineering blog posts for more about what’s changed since then.

In some ways, HTTP 3 is the same HTTP messages, just over QUIC.

But as you get into other features, there are differences. And your clients and servers need to both have fallbacks to HTTP 2, since UDP connectivity might not be available, and fallback is expected.

So, you have to build support for having working push, or not. Or having working priorities, or not. Or having long-lived non-HTTP sockets, or using fallbacks like web sockets or even long polling. There’s even more fun on the horizon, and I’m not looking forward to my colleagues thinking of a fallback strategy for some of those...

Even in the proxy case (which is my day job), it's often worth the price of the up-front load polling to have sufficiently recent information to take action on. The most obvious cases are those where you have some (or all) requests being expensive, as opposed to thousands of exclusively tiny requests.

This does depend on having a local load balancing layer (not, say, making a choice between two servers that are each 50+ms away from the load balancer), and also having a high-performance RPC stack (C++ on both sides, and Thrift, in my case).

In the two cases mentioned, there isn't any extra _response_ time.

> servers cannot periodically advertise their load measures to clients

This is an asynchronous mechanism - you can use polling, push, or queue, or whatever. Individual responses don't pay the cost.

> staple current load reports to query responses, which the client can cache and use for a period of time

This is just a few extra bytes in the response, which likely has negligible cost. One can fairly reasonably say that responses don't pay any cost.

Obviously there are other costs - it just depends on what you're trading off between on whether it is the right decision.

> Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night?

I happened to look at that trend. Nobody that I saw were actually suggesting people do it - they were quoting (or referring to) what was being said by those at the Capitol, and then commenting on it.

I don’t see a double standard for those cases, although they did subsequently remove it the trend. Possibly because some people might have been calling for it in the “latest” tab - not a fun place looking at tweets outside the featured tab...

Your job title/level/rank (“Principal Engineer”, “IC6”, ...) is what you’ve been deemed capable of (usually by doing it). But your role on a particular project is going to depend on what’s needed. Sometimes you’ll be the lead of the whole thing. Or the lead of a piece of it. Or just another contributor.

Some performance management systems are poorly designed to handle scenarios like this, admittedly.

But it’s not actually factually true - it’s her money according to the laws and contracts in place. If it were his money, he’d have it. He doesn’t, so it isn’t “factually” his money.

It’s only “his money” in a non-factual basis where we are implying something akin to “he earned it and she didn’t”.