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I believe the open systems db2 team was mainly based out of Canada, but I don't think you were really honestly asking that question. However, in case I can sha

I believe the open systems db2 team was mainly based out of Canada, but I don't think you were really honestly asking that question. However, in case I can share a bit that I may know some small amount about is that the area that the author worked on is quite well-known to IBMs db2 customers. The ability for db2 to self-tune has put it ahead of sql server, oracle and others in some ways, for decades. While the author clearly got hired and found himself in a good niche at IBM and grew there, IBMs database teams have definitely hired and sustained people from various backgrounds because the work can be challenging and rewarding. I'm saying this because one of my uncles maintained the lock manager in the mainframe db2 codebase for most of a couple of decades including being there at the time the author mentioned, working on sysplex and parallel sysplex, and he entered that gig without a particular interest in databases as he told it. But he really did take to assembly and production code maintenance

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
secondcoming 6y ago
> I don't think you were really honestly asking that question. I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. I'm asking how it comes to be that someone fresh out of uni is immediately made a Team Lead. It doesn't tally with my understanding of career ladders.
- ajstorm 6y ago
  Sometimes these things happen quite randomly. You'd think that a big company like IBM would have a long line of people ready to take on a juicy project like this, but at the time, all of those people were tied up with more pressing work (customer commits, a high-profile performance project, etc). Also, I've clearly glossed over a bunch of details but I wasn't hired as a team lead. That being said when management saw that I was capable of driving the team (mostly) on my own, they progressively stepped back further and further until I was essentially running the team. This was over the course of a few years, which I've compressed in the writeup. All that to say that career ladders aren't fixed, and if you find yourself in the right place at the right time, you can bypass a lot of the traditional ladder climbing.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I was curious, not critical.
- simtel20 6y ago
  > I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. Saying "Maybe his teams were all India based?" sounds dismissive or pejorative, as though you were saying that he must have been somewhere that was not doing premier work, or working as part of a cooperative team in a way that valued the work he and his team did. However the essay clearly described how innovative his ongoing work and contributions were when they were being done, including linking to research papers. They were progressively pushing forward the state of the art in the database world, and did it in production in wide deployment. What happened was that the culture at IBM identified him as someone who could lead, and as I described, their database organizations at the time helped grow people into these roles.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    That's quite an interpretation. What I was suggesting was that maybe he was the Canadian face of a remote team.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

secondcoming 6y ago

> I don't think you were really honestly asking that question. I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. I'm asking how it comes to be that someone fresh out of uni is immediately made a Team Lead. It doesn't tally with my understanding of career ladders.

ajstorm 6y ago
Sometimes these things happen quite randomly. You'd think that a big company like IBM would have a long line of people ready to take on a juicy project like this, but at the time, all of those people were tied up with more pressing work (customer commits, a high-profile performance project, etc). Also, I've clearly glossed over a bunch of details but I wasn't hired as a team lead. That being said when management saw that I was capable of driving the team (mostly) on my own, they progressively stepped back further and further until I was essentially running the team. This was over the course of a few years, which I've compressed in the writeup. All that to say that career ladders aren't fixed, and if you find yourself in the right place at the right time, you can bypass a lot of the traditional ladder climbing.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I was curious, not critical.
simtel20 6y ago
> I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. Saying "Maybe his teams were all India based?" sounds dismissive or pejorative, as though you were saying that he must have been somewhere that was not doing premier work, or working as part of a cooperative team in a way that valued the work he and his team did. However the essay clearly described how innovative his ongoing work and contributions were when they were being done, including linking to research papers. They were progressively pushing forward the state of the art in the database world, and did it in production in wide deployment. What happened was that the culture at IBM identified him as someone who could lead, and as I described, their database organizations at the time helped grow people into these roles.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  That's quite an interpretation. What I was suggesting was that maybe he was the Canadian face of a remote team.