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That's a very interesting story, can't find those in places other than HN, thanks for sharing. Out of interest, what was the reason they didn't start rebuilding

by SerCe 2y ago

That's a very interesting story, can't find those in places other than HN, thanks for sharing. Out of interest, what was the reason they didn't start rebuilding their stack on top of AWS? If it was cheaper and better, then it would make sense for them to effectively migrate all teams to their AWS-plus solution? Was there some anti-cloud sentiment?

jillesvangurp 2y ago
By that point they were redundant and no longer needed. And they were defensive about their internal stuff. Which of course included lots of hardware, software, network connections spanning the globe, teams that maintained various bits of software, and supported by a lot of bureaucracy, etc. All of that was replaced with AWS. That process went way to quickly for them to adapt. By the time they started complaining to management about being bypassed, the whole thing was basically a done deal. This kind of thing is highly disruptive to internal teams. Basically it starts with them being all the undisputed kings of their territory and then somebody going first principles on all of that and bypassing it completely. It's of course a complex story that involves multiple acquisitions and the acquired companies basically ignoring the internal stuff so they could actually get stuff done against all the silly internal bureaucracy, lack of flexibility, and internally focused & detached from reality management (many of whom were clear examples of the Peter principle). Once one team launched on AWS, things spread relatively. The managers associated with the project got some nice bonuses/promotions and incentives to do more. Coming back to the Google analogy here, I imagine a lot of this is playing out in the Flutter and Fuchsia teams currently. Google has flutter and non flutter UI products. And it pretty much stopped pretending Fuchsia has a future in any of it's products or internal server platforms. Correct me if I'm wrong. Just my impression. MS is a good example that slowly got over its internal platforms after Ballmer left. If you look at a lot of their recent stuff, it's a lot less about their internal platforms and legacy and a lot more about Linux, OSS, browser standards (they killed IE even), non .Net languages like python and typescript (which they created even), etc. That's a long journey from pretending the web was going to run on IE with things like vb script, xaml, and all the other failed stuff they pushed twenty years ago.

by SerCe 2y ago

jillesvangurp 2y ago

By that point they were redundant and no longer needed. And they were defensive about their internal stuff. Which of course included lots of hardware, software, network connections spanning the globe, teams that maintained various bits of software, and supported by a lot of bureaucracy, etc. All of that was replaced with AWS. That process went way to quickly for them to adapt. By the time they started complaining to management about being bypassed, the whole thing was basically a done deal. This kind of thing is highly disruptive to internal teams. Basically it starts with them being all the undisputed kings of their territory and then somebody going first principles on all of that and bypassing it completely. It's of course a complex story that involves multiple acquisitions and the acquired companies basically ignoring the internal stuff so they could actually get stuff done against all the silly internal bureaucracy, lack of flexibility, and internally focused & detached from reality management (many of whom were clear examples of the Peter principle). Once one team launched on AWS, things spread relatively. The managers associated with the project got some nice bonuses/promotions and incentives to do more. Coming back to the Google analogy here, I imagine a lot of this is playing out in the Flutter and Fuchsia teams currently. Google has flutter and non flutter UI products. And it pretty much stopped pretending Fuchsia has a future in any of it's products or internal server platforms. Correct me if I'm wrong. Just my impression. MS is a good example that slowly got over its internal platforms after Ballmer left. If you look at a lot of their recent stuff, it's a lot less about their internal platforms and legacy and a lot more about Linux, OSS, browser standards (they killed IE even), non .Net languages like python and typescript (which they created even), etc. That's a long journey from pretending the web was going to run on IE with things like vb script, xaml, and all the other failed stuff they pushed twenty years ago.