Amazing read, and glad she could write this into history. It's amazing to me that Half-Life's status of immortality has more or less been preserved even today.
Damn, I love this. Information is dense and clustered, edges are sharp and it all feels so _human_. I can't stand the uncanny valley, fake minimalism lots-of-whitespace flat design bullshit that has taken over the web. This feels good to traverse through. Found a nice boxing channel I hadn't seen before
The degree of singular outrage this guy produces is something else. It's like a switch flips in peoples' brains and they go through a two-minutes (or maybe two hours in this article's case) hate session when they comment about him. Who else has gone from such adoration from the general internet to such revulsion?
In your article, your points about managing stateful data operations vs stateless tools is right on point. It's the eternal and ever-repeating argument that has to be made in every data shop I've ever been in when inevitably a manager or senior person suggests moving to scrum, because of this propagated lie that data engineers are just like software engineers. Glad to see it in writing.
I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).
And it's not like they don't understand the importance of mods' free labor to keep subreddits clean of filth and users visiting/contributing. I know somebody who worked there years ago, and it was understood that they had to preserve the good will and trust from mods of subreddits to keep Reddit in a functional and orderly state.
Had a similar experience, but with the much more tame marijuana. It was a 6-hour long panic attack for me. Similar to the author of this, I read for years of how "the only way it could ever harm you is if you were crushed by 100 lbs of it" on sites like Reddit. It wasn't until after getting high that I heard about marijuana amplifying stress tendencies in a minority of people. I've always been high strung, and maybe my experience reveals something that needs fixing inside of me, but given how marijuana turned my anxiety up to a measure that has only ever been matched by an actual panic attack, I'll avoid LSD (and anything similar like shrooms) like it's a loaded gun pointed right at me.
Twitch is probably at peak "enshittification." Disastrous business decisions, from both the degradation of the product in the name of profits, as well as the questionable way it has engaged with the growing discontent of streamers and its broader user base.
At one of the orgs I was with in Amazon, and we had some cross-channel comms and processes with them. It was always funny to us how Twitch employees wore their culture as a badge of honor (they never were really a part of Amazon, culturally speaking), but in practice they embodied the ugliest traits of stereotypical Amazon teams: zero trust or charitability from them, and the adversarial/transactional nature of meetings was cranked up to a thousand. They guarded their data and general information from us with a particular zeal out of a confessed mistrust. So you can imagine how ironic and funny it was on our side when their massive leak occurred.
I got jobs at my current and last workplace through a recruiter reaching out to me through LinkedIn. I'm not necessarily exceptional in my skills and experience, and I don't even have a profile picture. But for recruiters, it is a game of numbers, and all the fish are swimming in the LinkedIn pond. The utility is that LinkedIn greatly dampens half the strain that normally comes with the job hunt - one's own initiative in mass applying, curating companies, hell even finding companies.
This comment is perfect and elicited the long-buried inner rage I used to feel towards a former staff in an old company. I should not have had to navigate a staff engineer’s mind minefield like my BPD ex. Additionally, a person with that degree of influence should not hate directness and potential conflict more than he hates himself
Observation/mini rant: unfortunately the data industry is both very susceptible to fads and hype, and does not have widespread standardization or a generally-accepted set of best practices. The subset of data "influencers" whose discourse occurs mostly through Twitter and Substack have especially heavy sway in what is the current Data Big Thing. These people introduce new buzzwords and ride them to the mainstream, or redefine what were previously more-or-less anchored down concepts into new interpretations. It feels tepid and arbitrary, almost postmodern. On top of this, much of the "thought leadership" is being driven by individuals who lean heavily towards the soft-skill side. So we have a heavy overindexing on strong opinions around organizational methodologies, team structure and roles/responsibilities, and other Big Ideas without much engineering representation or consideration. What spawns from this are things like the "data mesh" and the bastardization of both data concepts and clear communication/thinking. The data mesh white paper perfectly encapsulates this[1]. I challenge anybody to try to read it and understand what the hell the author is even vaguely trying to say after a few passes.
This sounds similar to Flexport's CTO situation (he came from Amazon) and attempted microservice-ification of everything. Except it sounds like they weren't even able to get wheels up and are still floundering after years of planning and attempted execution.
I left about a year ago, but the universality of tools and stack was not a thing in the ~3 years I was there. Retail and AWS are split and use different stacks. Additionally, the company was in a drawn out multi-year process of deprecating old tooling (including Odin), so you had teams or orgs that were in-between these old internal services and new internal services (or off internal services altogether and on "native AWS"). If cross-team interoperability demanded that certain tooling was to be used, many times you could inadvertently hold back or screw over another team by deciding to stay or move to the new tooling.
Not to say it was all bad - some of it was certainly necessary. Especially for security - IMO the systems of Amazon are great with security, but not necessarily the spirit of the company. Without all that bureaucratic annoyance, there 100% would be existential leaks or breaches coming out of Amazon with how fast and loose everybody treated security in the name of "Deliver Results" .
Not quite the same as an entirely ex-Blizzard staffed group of people, but Riot Games and League of Legends as well. Tom Cadwell[0] was there from the very beginning of League's life and has had considerable influence over the development and growth of the game. Before that, he was on Warcraft 3's development team and supposedly (supposedly because I can't remember despite being on the War3 forums, and can't find evidence of it) had a hand in developing its fairly successful esports scene. And before that, he was actually one of the first Starcraft pro gamers in the late 90's, just before the explosion of esports in South Korea.
He's kind of a one-man army, but his influence definitely has shaped the more popular games and industry landscape today.