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Netflix End of Series 1
- rusk 5y agoI’m really curious to see how the rock star of cloud computing follows up Netflix …
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- j7ake 5y agoI guess at that point of ones career they can basically write their own job description and budget, and people will line up to pay them whatever that description says.
- leetrout 5y agoSpeculation: One of the game companies that do distribution (valve, epic) Working with old colleagues (as a C-level?) at oxide. One of the major cloud providers, very likely microsoft.
- ochoseis 5y agoOxide, maybe?
- joshbaptiste 5y agoPerhaps since some of the top ex Joyent engineers are there also..
- gfodor 5y agoYep, that’s my guess.
- youngtaff 5y agoThat was my guess too
- tominous 5y agoOpenAI, on AI alignment instrumentation?
- alberth 5y agoGiven that he just stated in this thread he doesn’t believe in Solaris/SmartOS ecosystem - probably not then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31052035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31052035
- alberth 5y agoCongrats to Brendan and he’s been huge to continuing the advancement of FreeBSD. I can only hope that he brings FreeBSD to his next employer & is allowed to continue his contributions.
- bitcharmer 5y agoWhat does he do in the BSD space? I always regarded him as Linux tracing/performance god.
- PedroBatista 5y agoBefore he got his Netflix special, he worked for Sun then Joyent in Solaris/BSD/SmartOS in stuff like ZFS and DTrace. The Linux stuff was a money-grab, some say he sold out.. :)
- brendangregg 5y agoI've been clear on HN multiple times that I saw no future in the Solaris/SmartOS ecosystem by 2014, which is one (but not the only) reason I left it. I was right too: https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/solaris.do https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/solaris.do
- haggy102 5y agoIgnore the troll and thank you for all your content Brendan!
- PedroBatista 5y agoRelax it was a joke. You can state your appreciation without disparaging others who didn't follow your direct means of communication.
- PyWoody 5y agoI thought it was pretty clearly a joke. Maybe a ";)" emoji would have been more explicit.
- joshbaptiste 5y agoI've been following Brendan since the Sun Microsystems days with his Dtrace book which opened my eyes to the world of system call tracing from user-space to kernel. Linux at the time had a hodgepodge of tracing utilities (SystemTap, Ktap etc..) that usually required kernel modules to work properly. Strace was my goto in Linux back then but slowed down the target binary a lot. Thank the universe for eBPF and Brendan's current books that today we have powerful tracing capabilities in Linux that rivals Dtrace in FreeBSD/Illumos. If you want to understand the internals of an operating system and how things work, without being a kernel developer, systems performance engineering is a way to go.
- Teletio 5y agoBrendan has my dream job. I even hoped joining Netflix in the future to say hi to him :) Doing performance analysis feels like the final thing to fully understand the whole stack and I always was curios on how things work. Let's see were he will go. Perhaps it's easier to follow but I doubt it. There are companies I'm following for a while because certain positions are just seldom pop up. When I joined sap I heard the term headcount for the first time but makes it more understandable.
- random3 5y agoPeformance (beyond analysis) is one of the most interesting things to do beyond building things. It's needed and relevant in many settings and you can (have to) do it without the JD (and IMO you should at least initially). You'll find plenty of this at any relevant size infrastructure place (there are a lot of them). The principle to do whatever you love is to "ask for forgivness not permission". Feel free to understand why you're solving what you're solving in order to challenge it and do it right.
- Teletio 5y agoI'm currently at a very big company (not faang) and I had the chance to do a little bit of performance analysis. But unfortunate it was a totally unoptimized thing so only quick low hanging fruits. Like io bound but they didn't though that component is the issue as it was not CPU bound, bad SQL queries and unoptimized caches. Nothing big or difficult to analyse :-( I learned about one person who is only doing java Performance analysis and he said it took a while to be known in the industry good enough that he can do it fulltime. And he has to travel to allot of customers.
- ianai 5y agoHey it’s fine to build a name for yourself while knocking out low hanging fruit. It’s still bringing useful and meaningful results in a professional setting.
- saagarjha 5y ago
- birdyrooster 5y agoCongrats on getting out of the asylum Brendan
- tkiolp4 5y agoOff topic: I’m a bit surprised about Gregg’s desk (pre-pandemic). I imagine he’s getting a top level salary at Netflix but yet he’s got a small desk in what it looks to me a shared small office (or perhaps is that a mini open space office? Can’t tell).
- brendangregg 5y agoA number of times people have asked about my desk over the years, and I'm curious as to why! I've visited other tech companies in the bay area, and the desks I see (including for 7-figure salary engineers) are the same as everyone else, in open office layouts. At Netflix it's been open office desks, and all engineers have the same desk. Does some companies give bigger desks for certain staff, or offices, or is it a country thing (Europe?).
- Tsiklon 5y agoI think given your visibility and profile (compared to many tech workers), the previous poster expected a grand office or vast desk, certainly different from the setup “everyone else” has.
- brendangregg 5y agoI understand why people might think that, but I'm not sure it'd be great for the culture for me to be different from my coworkers. We're all working on important things, and we all need to collaborate together.
- Tsiklon 5y agoAbsolutely, I agree with you there. I’m relatively junior in my team and my team is quite absent of clout within our organisation as we’re a new team. Our correspondent teams are much more approachable when it comes to collaborating than I’ve experienced in the past - it’s something I find very refreshing.
- simsla 5y ago
- mkhnews 5y agoGood luck in your next adventure and a big thank you for all your past work, blogs, tools and books. Much appreciated and helpful in my work.
- rganesan 5y agoI've followed you awesome work on Linux performance tuning over the years. All the best for whatever you're doing next and I hope it ends up in another book for us mere mortals to read :-).
- ianai 5y agoFirst time I’m really hearing about Brendan Gregg’s work. Not that I’m someone who should know, but I think this puts eBPF on my future studies list. Plus Australia sounds very cool. Currently working towards RHCE certification myself after a long time of swearing I don’t need it. (I want a new, more advanced job so I need it.) I am so grateful somebody’s using FreeBSD in 2022 in production. I do wonder whether there’s anything that could get it more use. Maybe a certification and backing company like red hat does for Linux. Or something more harebrained like a smartphone app geared towards systems management for the upcoming generation. I’ve heard they’re generally less interested in this stuff. I say this because it’s awesome to see Netflix having people so deep in the tech stack. But somehow still feels a little fragile.
- bostonsre 5y agoHis systems performance book is also ridiculously pragmatic and eye opening and definitely worth a read.
- throw-away_42 5y agoThis video is how a lot of people first learned about Brendan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- hyperpl 5y agoI was happy to see a Thinkpad docking station on your desk, good choice on laptop!
- nine_zeros 5y agoWhen engineers like Brendan Gregg complain about American immigration and visa processes, you know something is really really f-ed up in how America treats humans.
- xiphias2 5y agoNetflix has generally amazing latency, I can feel that the engineers work really hard on fixing all latency issues, except when it totally fails: offline mode. I always have some films downloaded on my iPad Pro that I want to watch when I don't have internet (travelling on long plane flight), and with Netflix always the best films that I want to watch are ,,expired''. It would take 1 second to ,,renew'' them, but I have to wait until the end of the flight to have internet access again, and then I forget it, as I don't look at downloads anymore. It's really frustrating that I see that I have something downloaded, taking space on my SSD, but can't be used when I need it. I wish it could just renew the video certificates automatically whenever I access the internet, and generally it would be great to have better analysis tools for offline / crappy internet for companies. Usually I use Youtube more on the plane, because it doesn't play these games with me.
- zwily 5y agoI have the same experience. It feels like the download experience was only really made for the “I’m watching a series and want to keep watching it on the plane” use case, and not the “I downloaded 10 episodes of Micky Mouse for my 3yo on our last trip a year ago and now she wants to watch them again but I can’t cause…” use case.
- effingwewt 5y agosomething that was solved with recordable media, then with the internet instantly via usenet, then pirate sites. these companies will never learn, they literally invent their own problems as soon as they think they can force their bullshit on us.
- nikau 5y agoArrrrrr if only there was an easy solution me matey
- hintymad 5y agoThis reminds me of this post titled "Netflix is a truly great company": https://www.teamblind.com/post/netflix-is-a-truly-great-company-KyCWi7vU https://www.teamblind.com/post/netflix-is-a-truly-great-comp.... BTW, their compensation system is the most fair in the industry.
- axg11 5y agoThanks for sharing this. Why do more companies not follow this philosophy? Perhaps one advantage for Netflix is that they’re largely a one-trick pony. They don’t have 20+ products fighting for attention and engineers within the company.
- hintymad 5y agoMy take is that that philosophy needs a system, or culture if you will, to support it. Not every company has such supporting culture.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seneca 5y agoBrendan is truly one of the best educators in tech engineering. He may not think of himself as such, and he's also obviously a fantastic engineer, but what really stands out to me is his ability to communicate ideas coherently. So much of the "staff+" engineer world is hot air, and Brendan has always struck a contrast with his straight forward, information-dense blog posts and books, and down-to-earth communication style. He explores, and often defines, the frontiers of what we do and then brings back lessons. I'm a huge fan, and can't wait to see what he does (and shares) next.
- clmetaa0 5y agoI hope he will be contributing to the performance space as much as he's been at Netflix. His books and blogs have helped many including me better understand the whole stack.
- wunderwuzzi23 5y agoI like Brendan's Commodore 64 mouse pad in the pic! I have the same one! :)
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 5y agoWhat brand for notebook lock on the left table ?