"We are the priests who maintain the holy money printer called Steam for our lordship, first of his name Gabe Newell, so that he may purchase fleets of yachts. Don't rock the boat by hiring someone who doesn't get it." They could have said it like this with a lot less bullshit. And Silicon Valley could learn a lot from this company.
Sentry is atrocious. The thing runs Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Kafka, like a dozen huge components on their own as its backend. Their hosted vs self-hosted support is bad so deploying the thing yourself is a nightmare. The opposite of a zero config philosophy.
“Perhaps this overuse of leverage is explained by” it’s explained by it being a silly little toy game. This experiment goes way differently if you use the one page business section of The Economist. WSJ front page is going to be literal clickbait.
I started out firmly against large companies. My ideal team is 10-20 engineers, in person, hyper focused and all on the same page with mutual respect. Minimal or no product manager types.
But I’m also sick of hearing how these teams can “ship” so fast. Yeah you can ship, you have no customers. No users, no SLAs, no employees. Good work, you just did whatever you wanted and then typed “git push” to a repo you control, with standards you control, and a build process you control. Wow those stodgy big co’s could learn something from you!
This is a similar convo to “why use Kubernetes”. Do you have one binary and one database with one password? Go nuts with your single VPS and bash scripts and keep telling yourself that everyone is over complicating it. But are you scaling? You’ll probably need some orchestration. You’ll probably need some managers, a ticket system, on-call, standard build tools. Documentation.
Scaling to billions with a team of 20 is a fantasy achieved only by the select few. As always it is a fine line companies should tread lightly. Don’t rush to hire, but don’t be afraid of it either. Focus on scaling intentionally and carefully.
According to Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. The hard truth is Google needs a Twitter style culling. Take all those billions you're burning and give it to people with a builder mentality, not career sheeple. Unfortunately the same executives who would oversee this are the ones who need to be culled first.
This is the sort of stuff I use it for all the time, great examples. Or summarizing new concepts, reformatting strings or tables quickly, asking what some strange code snippet might be doing.
Pretty wild take. In what word does someone write some of the greatest fantasy novels of all time and then just hand the last two off to someone else? In the name of “productivity” of all things. This line of thinking sounds like a Hollywood producer trying to crank out hits.
Knowing GPT, this is probably as simple as priming it not to overly explain every time that it has considered the instructions. Otherwise every single time it would say “I have thought about how relevant this is to your preset instructions and…”.
They are still stuck in the mindset of “this is our proprietary secret and we can’t let others catch up.” That mindset is just one of the reasons their company is stagnating.
The highest rank in my mind is the tenured professor who builds businesses from the safety of the university. Those few who poach the brightest students for their lab, leverage that into a startup (or more than one), and exit for millions while collecting university checks. This brings me awe, respect, jealousy, and distaste in equal measure.
This reminds of how the politburo of China is often made up of engineers, chemists, and people with similar backgrounds. Whereas American politicians are all lawyers.
Layoffs may be needed. But there should be a healthy dose of executives included for making those hiring decisions. And they should do it all at once. Doing it in waves is absolutely brutal.
The consequences of failure in America are higher, that’s why we work so hard. You are a millionaire, or you are homeless. The in between is a hard and continuous struggle to get to the former and avoid becoming the latter.
Thanks for sharing. Perhaps it’s useful to share that if I had started earlier, I may have gotten more leeway without leaving. Asking the company for a break, literally saying “this is too much for me now.” When I started, it was too late. Good luck friend.