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Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh ou

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense. The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself. When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost. It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.

pmiller2 7y ago
This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?
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ben_jones 7y ago
> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)" I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay! Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well. The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

pmiller2 7y ago

This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ben_jones 7y ago

> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)" I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay! Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well. The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).