26 Jun
2019
26 Jun
'19
11:44 p.m.
On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 11:11:43AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Larry, there
are many, many
engineers who works because they get a paycheck, and so they go home
at 5pm. Some people might be free to improve their code on their own
time, or late at night, but corporation also preach "work/life
balance" --- and then don't fund time for making code long-term
maintainable or reducing tech debt.
Yeah, I was talking about 25-30 years ago. And even then there were
people who were there for the paycheck. But the people I considered
my peers were people who cared deeply about doing work well. The
motivation was that we were at Sun, everyone wanted a Sun workstation,
which made it all the more important that we did stuff right.
If you need any proof, look no further than me. I was the guy who was
so happy to be at Sun, I walked around for 3 years saying "I'd do this
job for free if I had enough money" :)
I think that feeling still exists but it is much harder to find these
days, systems work seems to have dried up, kids think a server is a
VM, it's a strange world.
There is a similar related issue around publishing
papers to document
great ideas. This takes time away from product development, and it
used to be that Sun was really prolific at documenting their technical
innovations at conferences like Usenix. Over time, the academic
traditions started dying off, and managers who came from that
tradition moved on, retired, or got promoted beyond the point where
they could encourage engineers to do that work. And it wasn't just at
Sun; I was working at IBM when IBM decided to take away the (de
minimus) bonus for publishing papers at conferences.
Huh, I didn't know IBM gave bonuses for papers, Sun never did. I don't
remember, but they may have paid for us to go to a conference.
But at the
Usenix board, I remember looking at a chart of the declining number of
ATC papers coming from industry over time. And it was very depressing...
Tell me about it. Systems work just isn't what it once was.