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I think that's a false dichotomy. Every employed programmer is building software to solve problems. The "product" of that labor doesn't have to be something tha
by CGamesPlay 13y ago
I think that's a false dichotomy. Every employed programmer is building software to solve problems. The "product" of that labor doesn't have to be something that a non-programmer uses. For example, our memcached engineers at Facebook are building a product in the sense that other engineers will consume the service that they maintain. The word "product" simply helps to frame the fact that the goal of their work is to build, maintain, and optimize this service. If the work they are doing isn't towards that, then they aren't doing their job.
- alexgartrell 13y agoSo I was a memcached engineer. The memcached team barely works on memcached anymore, because there are no real returns. Being product focused means that it doesn't make much sense to really increase the perf on something when there's other stuff to be done, even if you could do it in a really glamorous way (user space network drivers spring to mind for this -- that'd be pretty cool) Instead, they focus on superior libraries and different use cases that make the stack more efficient. (Mcdipper was my project here). In infra, you are measured by two things: 1) dollars saved and 2) features made possible (in a very global way, sometimes this means business deals). You also get points for the site continuing to work
- samstave 13y agoIt sounds, based on what you say, that they are replacingthe famous meritocracy of google with a technocracy? Is this your impression?