4 ms·

You may want to reconsider before you step into the time machine. First of all, 1991 in particular is a tough year -- it was a crushing recession in the US, an

You may want to reconsider before you step into the time machine. First of all, 1991 in particular is a tough year -- it was a crushing recession in the US, and young people were having a really hard time finding jobs. So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft. And this is absolutely the "why-are-manhole-covers-round" era of Microsoft, and it's the DOS era as well -- so not only is the company smarmy, its products are buggy, demoralizing piles of death-marched junk. Read the (excellent) Showstopper! for a hint of what awaits you at Microsoft. There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era. [0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US

jjav 5y ago
> So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft. Late '91 I was graduating soon and I did go to the university recruiting stalls of Sun and IBM and Motorola. DEC was a presence but I loved SunOS and didn't like VMS so didn't talk to them. Never considered Microsoft since I hated them so much already back then. Ended going in a different direction due to a graduate degree scholarship but thinking back maybe should've joined Sun directly back then. I did later end up at Sun a few years later, roughly same timeframe as you.
thundergolfer 5y ago
It's great to get this extra perspective from you Bryan, because you're probably the person whose talks have most made me interested in seeing 1990s Sun Microsystems et al. Point taken about 1991's struggles. I was vaguely aware that it was a troubled time, but took the premise as is. Which particular part of the 90s was best seems an awkward question. Were things generally getting better through the 90s until dot-com bust turned everything to shit? Thanks for the book recommendation. I've added it to my Goodreads list. I'll checkout the talk too. I haven't seen that one of yours, because I saw the title and figured it was heavy on memory-management and pretty out of my wheelhouse.
- bcantrill 5y ago
  It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!) As for the progression of software development, this may be trite to say, but in my opinion the single most important revolution in software is the rise of open source. I don't think that there was a single event here per se but rather a multi-decade long progression across many different domains that has changed just about every single aspect of software development. (Cloud computing too, certainly -- but I don't think that cloud computing is economically viable without open source.) So software development from the 1990s is unrecognizable in large part because it is just so damned proprietary -- which, as it turns out, was in fact a relatively short blip in the fullness of history.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk, in which I expand a bit on the history of open source, among other things
  - thundergolfer 5y ago
    I'm early enough my career to not at all find it trite. Open-source has certainly been the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of my software work so far. If I was thrown back to the 90s with knowledge of 2020s open-source culture, I'd be frustrated as hell. I didn't fully appreciate how important open-source is as a 21st century movement until I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar this year. Hearing the open-source development story of SQLite also blew my mind a little. I can see why you're so energized by open-source firmware.

jjav 5y ago

> So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft. Late '91 I was graduating soon and I did go to the university recruiting stalls of Sun and IBM and Motorola. DEC was a presence but I loved SunOS and didn't like VMS so didn't talk to them. Never considered Microsoft since I hated them so much already back then. Ended going in a different direction due to a graduate degree scholarship but thinking back maybe should've joined Sun directly back then. I did later end up at Sun a few years later, roughly same timeframe as you.

thundergolfer 5y ago

It's great to get this extra perspective from you Bryan, because you're probably the person whose talks have most made me interested in seeing 1990s Sun Microsystems et al. Point taken about 1991's struggles. I was vaguely aware that it was a troubled time, but took the premise as is. Which particular part of the 90s was best seems an awkward question. Were things generally getting better through the 90s until dot-com bust turned everything to shit? Thanks for the book recommendation. I've added it to my Goodreads list. I'll checkout the talk too. I haven't seen that one of yours, because I saw the title and figured it was heavy on memory-management and pretty out of my wheelhouse.

bcantrill 5y ago
It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!) As for the progression of software development, this may be trite to say, but in my opinion the single most important revolution in software is the rise of open source. I don't think that there was a single event here per se but rather a multi-decade long progression across many different domains that has changed just about every single aspect of software development. (Cloud computing too, certainly -- but I don't think that cloud computing is economically viable without open source.) So software development from the 1990s is unrecognizable in large part because it is just so damned proprietary -- which, as it turns out, was in fact a relatively short blip in the fullness of history.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk, in which I expand a bit on the history of open source, among other things
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  I'm early enough my career to not at all find it trite. Open-source has certainly been the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of my software work so far. If I was thrown back to the 90s with knowledge of 2020s open-source culture, I'd be frustrated as hell. I didn't fully appreciate how important open-source is as a 21st century movement until I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar this year. Hearing the open-source development story of SQLite also blew my mind a little. I can see why you're so energized by open-source firmware.