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>the Fuchsia team’s approximately 400 members ...what? There were FOUR HUNDRED people working on this thing at G? Quite literally the opposite of the anecdote
by foooorsyth 3y ago
>the Fuchsia team’s approximately 400 members
...what? There were FOUR HUNDRED people working on this thing at G? Quite literally the opposite of the anecdote from the "Androids" book where the Sony (?) execs were confused when the Danger, Inc guys told them Brian Swetland wrote all the code for the T-mobile Sidekick by himself (whereas Sony (?) had teams and teams of people for the same stuff in their offerings).
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThese numbers often get inflated because the people in change count every part-time worker as a full team member (bigger headcount = bigger promotion!). But it's still a crazy number. At every level everyone is incentivized to bloat the headcount as much as possible.
- dylan604 3y agoIt’s basically “I caught a fish this big” story where each telling increases the size
- azemetre 3y agoI don't think part time work in SWE is common at all. Especially at Google. The 400 number is likely including product owners, business analyst, designers, etc into those numbers not strictly being SWEs (happy to be proven wrong).
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThat's not what I mean. At Google you can be 50% on one project and 50% on another.
- tylerhou 3y agoYou can but it’s not common either (across orgs).
- canucker2016 3y agoFor a comparison, initial Windows NT 3.1 had 340 devs/testers, NT 3.5 had 530 devs/testers. No idea why product/program managers aren't listed. There must have been some. See https://danluu.com/microsoft-culture/ https://danluu.com/microsoft-culture/
- xrayarx 3y agoDoes anybody know how MS does Windows development these days? Just curious…
- gumby 3y agoI hope someone at Microsoft does, though their attention seems to be elsewhere.
- midoridensha 3y agoI'm guessing around 800: 3 devs for the OS core, the rest for the adware and spyware. (/s)
- azemetre 3y agoThat's good to know, honestly surprised to read that NT had that many. I'd figured early versions wouldn't require that many people. Now knowing the Fuchsia numbers, I don't know if that's a signal to how productive the team is or if they dwindling resources.
- heavenlyblue 3y agoAnd also for comparison, Windows NT 3.1 had to run and interact with a much broader zoo of devices.
- wmf 3y agoThis anecdote is a little mangled; Danger was a small startup but the Sidekick wasn't written by one person.
- Gigachad 3y agoThe project seemed super bloated. I remember thay had at least one person who seemed to be working full time on a clone of vim which iirc was considered part of the OS.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThat is a very googley, very stupid thing to do.
- skavi 3y agoYou’re referring to Raph Levien’s work on Xi [0]. Not really just a vim clone. In Fuchsia, iirc, it would have been the basis of all text editing services. If nothing else, it seems to have popularized rope data structures [1] for newer text editors. [0]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor [1]: https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_00.html https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_00.html
- saagarjha 3y agoWait until you hear how many people work on Android today.
- izzydata 3y agoIt's no wonder they constantly re-invent the wheel with Android every year. They must be at a total loss of how to make anything novel with it.
- booi 3y agoAt least they aren’t reinventing the entire OS… wait
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoBut Fuscia might have tens of thousands of users whereas Android has billions, right?
- izacus 3y agoWhat does number of users have to do with the amount of components/code and related support an OS needs?
- jsnell 3y ago"Need" is a binary concept, that's not how project planning and prioritization work in the real world. There are a lot of things that are not "needed" that are beneficial, and a lot of things that are beneficial that you end up not having resources to implement. So then it is all about tradeoffs. Software projects can derive massive economies of scale from a large install base, since there is no marginal cost. A larger install base lets you amortize the fixed cost over more users. The more users you have, the more useful but not strictly need optimisations and features you can justify implementing.
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIt is an entire OS. Canonical has 500 so the number isn't surprising for a fully original, in development OS. Does it feel like they have 400 people working on it given the PR? Nope. I'm a little surprised it's still in development.
- hulitu 3y agoFor an OS which is only used on smart speakers is a lot of developers. In the meantime Android receives updates up to 2 years.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoMy knowledge can and probably is very out of date given how many of Google's projects are publicly realized. But my impression was that Fuschia is a general purpose OS and was planned (like, very long term planned) to eventually become the OS of choice for some Android and Chromebook devices. A project that lofty makes sense to have 400 engineers on.
- pawelmurias 3y agoCanonical with all that people is making a very mediocre desktop experience. So doesn't seem surprising making something actually good would take a lot more.
- bluGill 3y agoDesktop experience is generally not the same people as the OS. Desktop experience is a lot more complex than an OS (both are complex in different ways though)
- smallerfish 3y agoMy guess is that around 75% of Canonical's staffing is sales, sales engineering, customer support, marketing, and misc business functions.
- philjohn 3y ago
- re-thc 3y ago> There were FOUR HUNDRED people working on this thing at G? It's a people retention project to stop ex-important hires from getting poached.
- spiffytech 3y agoThat's what I've heard too: some high-up engineer is bored but Google wants to keep their talent on staff, so they hand them a shiny, exciting computer science playground with grand aspirations.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoSomewhat of an ironic anecdote since Brian Swetlands' LinkedIn says he spent 3 years on the Fuchsia team.
- swetland 3y agoMost of that was when the team was pretty tiny. It was fun starting from when the kernel was just beginning to run userspace code. I'm still very happy with how the syscalls turned out. If I did it again, I'd stick with a (small) monolithic kernel though -- makes a lot of things simpler.
- nextaccountic 3y agoit's my impression that fuschia syscalls work like linux's vDSO. why don't linux use vDSO for more things?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yencabulator 3y agovDSO doesn't provide a security boundary. vDSO basically provides a pure-userspace fastpath for syscalls, only making the real syscall if necessary. It's great for low-overhead read-only calls that cache well and that you're always allowed to do, like clock_gettime(2) -- but not much more. You can't implement all syscalls as vDSO; if it's a vDSO the goal is to not make an actual syscall at all. Fuchsia might use vDSO-style things more as a way to replace the glibc-style syscall stubs, abstracting away the actual syscall ABI? That doesn't remove the actual syscall. > why don't linux use vDSO for more things? vDSO is much more complex to manage than traditional syscalls, can't be used for anything except pure read always allowed things, etc. As for optimizing syscalls, it seems things are moving more toward io_uring and ringbuffers of messages going in/out of the kernel, with very few syscalls made after setup.
- swetland 3y ago
- winrid 3y agoOr, over double the number of engineers on WinNT when it launched...
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoAnd that 400# is after a round of layoffs which apparently hit Fuchsia fairly hard. When I was in the home/hardware PA, they seemed to have unlimited headcount. But still couldn't seem to actually ship anything. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, and all that.