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Management that refuses to fund or mandate any common infrastructure. Jack likes running his companies like "an economy of startups" but in practice this means

Management that refuses to fund or mandate any common infrastructure. Jack likes running his companies like "an economy of startups" but in practice this means nobody is allowed to do things without fast returns. Teams are encouraged to use whatever programming language and infrastructure they think fits them. It is the fast track of tragedy of the commons problems.

tdeck 3y ago
I worked at Square from 2014 to 2016 and this wasn't my experience. In fact, Square invested a lot in infrastructure that was pretty impressive compared to other companies of a similar size. We're talking 800-1200 people and they had a single common custom deployment system that had been built before Docker was a thing, and later replaced that with a new in house system (p2) based on containers while I was there. They had a common custom CI system that all services used, and that actually worked quite well (much nicer than Jenkins which was common at the time). And Square really only had 3 languages that were acceptable to use for services (Java, Ruby, and Golang; node.js being phased out). I remember interviewing people at other larger companies and finding they didn't have things we had at Square in 2014, like a common way of configuring and registering services, or an easy way to see what's running on a particular box, or service-to-service ACLs, or a tool to coordinate online schema changes. Square even built their own S2S RPC protocol based on protobufs, and went on to participate in the design of gRPC. Maybe it's changed since then, I don't know. But the culture was pretty solid when I was there. And the plateng team ran multiple DC failover tests of our service while I worked there.
- dzader 3y ago
  [dead]
- shams93 3y ago
  Those are all garbage collected languages so I am betting they are reaching the size where they're going to need to transition to stronger iron like rust or c++.
  - dalyons 3y ago
    Lol I’m betting they wont. GC has pretty much nothing to do with squares real challenges - you’re confusing your personal preferences with actual business utility.
  - 12345hn6789 3y ago
    Well no, fortunately the real world doesn't revolve around language wars. Those GC languages are well vetted and system architecture will tell whether their services will scale or not
- blamestross 3y ago
  Yeah, all that stopped being directly supported and stopped being mandated for use. There was a strong cultural rebellion against "senior engineers dictating policy"

tdeck 3y ago

I worked at Square from 2014 to 2016 and this wasn't my experience. In fact, Square invested a lot in infrastructure that was pretty impressive compared to other companies of a similar size. We're talking 800-1200 people and they had a single common custom deployment system that had been built before Docker was a thing, and later replaced that with a new in house system (p2) based on containers while I was there. They had a common custom CI system that all services used, and that actually worked quite well (much nicer than Jenkins which was common at the time). And Square really only had 3 languages that were acceptable to use for services (Java, Ruby, and Golang; node.js being phased out). I remember interviewing people at other larger companies and finding they didn't have things we had at Square in 2014, like a common way of configuring and registering services, or an easy way to see what's running on a particular box, or service-to-service ACLs, or a tool to coordinate online schema changes. Square even built their own S2S RPC protocol based on protobufs, and went on to participate in the design of gRPC. Maybe it's changed since then, I don't know. But the culture was pretty solid when I was there. And the plateng team ran multiple DC failover tests of our service while I worked there.

dzader 3y ago
[dead]
shams93 3y ago
Those are all garbage collected languages so I am betting they are reaching the size where they're going to need to transition to stronger iron like rust or c++.
- dalyons 3y ago
  Lol I’m betting they wont. GC has pretty much nothing to do with squares real challenges - you’re confusing your personal preferences with actual business utility.
- 12345hn6789 3y ago
  Well no, fortunately the real world doesn't revolve around language wars. Those GC languages are well vetted and system architecture will tell whether their services will scale or not
blamestross 3y ago
Yeah, all that stopped being directly supported and stopped being mandated for use. There was a strong cultural rebellion against "senior engineers dictating policy"