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Walmart Labs: Why we run an open source program

163 points by jamesgpearce 12y ago

jvehent 12y ago
You know what's cooler than working for Walmart? Working on disrupting Walmart, and forcing them to increase the quality of the products they sell to keep competing.
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Huh? They're competing just fine by keeping prices down, which is what most consumers look for first. You'd have to disrupt our current socioeconomic situation. So unless you can beat their prices and their quality, good luck.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    I do that by going to Costco much as possible.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      Costco has something like 1% of the product selection that Walmart has.. let alone online purchases... Given, I tend to order a lot via Amazon, but no brick and mortar store comes close to the U.S. market penetration that Walmart has. Most of the population (mid-high 90's iirc) is within 5 miles of a Walmart. Say what you will, but they're probably about the only shopping choice in competition with the likes of Amazon.
      - meric 12y ago
        http://www.bookdepository.com http://www.bookdepository.com sells books for cheaper for free shipping to Australia and is much better than Amazon for books IMHO.
        darrenmc 12y ago
        The book depository is owned by Amazon
        tracker1 12y ago
        Which is fine, but I didn't mention books.
  - objclxt 12y ago
    > Huh? They're competing just fine by keeping prices down, which is what most consumers look for first I dispute that. If consumers looked to price first everyone reading this would be using a ChromeBook, but I imagine a sizable number are using MacBooks instead. A more generic example: some consumers will buy the cheapest possible clothing, but most consumers look to a reasonable compromise of price and quality.
    - copperx 12y ago
      This is an obtuse simplification. I would be happy with a Chromebook if I didn't happen to be a developer. Also, it's not easy for the layperson to measure the quality of groceries. A lettuce is a lettuce, so I'll buy it where it's cheaper.
    - tvmalsv 12y ago
      Just because you're price sensitive, that doesn't mean that you'll buy something you don't want, just because it's cheaper than what you do want. There's been plenty of research that shows most people are more interested in lower prices than making some sort of social statement.
      - wildgift 12y ago
        True. I think most people want the lowest price for a specific branded product. They start off by deciding, more or less, on getting a certain level of perceived quality, and then finding low prices. The price is secondary to making the decision to purchase a product. As far as making a "social statement" - buying most recognizable or branded products is a kind of social statement. If it weren't, we wouldn't have such a diverse selection of cars, clothes and laptops.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - knowaveragejoe 12y ago
      That's perhaps one of the worst examples you could give to support your argument. The vast majority of people are not developers or otherwise employed in well compensated IT jobs. They most certainly look to price first when it comes to personal computers.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Disrupt Wal-mart? Best laugh I had all day.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
The majority of great engineers have GitHub profiles and have been working on projects there (open source and otherwise). The stack has become ubiquitous, and the majority of engineers either like it, or are “happy” enough with it. There are a few grey beards that rant on about Perforce or something else… but that is pretty rare :) The majority of great engineers... in what field? Web development? Probably. Some language communities are also disproportionately represented. As a whole though, I can't buy that everyone has been totally assimilated into GitHub. I also like how everything other than GitHub (not even Git) and Perforce has just about spontaneously evaporated according to this paragraph.
- briholt 12y ago
  Classic selection and confirmation bias. I have a GitHub profile > I'm great > I only hire great people > I only hire people with a GitHub profile > Everyone I hire is great and has a GitHub profile > Everyone who is great has a GitHub profile.
- objclxt 12y ago
  Agreed. You need to recognize that there are some of the best engineers in the world work at companies where they aren't able to put code on GitHub, or it isn't worth it for them. You're working on something secretive, you have a family and want to spend your free time with then rather than weekends dealing with pull requests, etc.
  - lultimouomo 12y ago
    This mindset also creates and incentive for employers to keep their engineers from working on open source as much as possible, so that they don't look attractive to other employers and are never able to jump ship / ask a pay raise. In general, I think it is a very lazy and ineffective answer to the "interviewing is hard" problem.
- codeonfire 12y ago
  I must be in the minority. I am the greatest engineer in all fields, and I don't use github because my job is not github friendly. I only say I'm the greatest because, hey, if we are throwing around value judgements about engineers I'm going to grab me some. Actually, I wish that practice would stop. Every blogger seems to know who is the greatest, and not surprisingly it's always themselves and people they know using the same technology as they are.
Flux159 12y ago
I'm not going to comment on who is writing the article because that's not the point. I think this is a good article pushing for more open source development at traditionally large enterprise software companies. It helps the open source community and it helps the company attract talent. It also gives good advice to large enterprises saying that they shouldn't just throw their code into open source without good documentation and community engagement. At the very least its a good start for companies that would have otherwise kept all their code internally. Just because the article mentions Walmart Labs working on hapi (apparently an express-like nodejs framework) doesn't mean that HN should suddenly disregard the content of the article (as some of the other comments seem to be doing).
- mathattack 12y ago
  Good points. This can be a good article for people in large companies who need to justify Open Source efforts.
  - bglazer 12y ago
    Yep I plan to post this to my company's intranet social network. My understanding is that our company's policies prohibit contributing to the open source projects we use.
  - spydum 12y ago
    im afraid this article will fall on deaf ears to those folks. most c-level folks are all about protecting intellectual property and racking up patents. indeed, there are special little ceremonies for patent awards, along with bonus at most enterprise corps.
  - leppr 12y ago
    If you have 40 minutes to waste, this talk from a Facebook manager talks about this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk
kevan 12y ago
There's an interesting balance between maintaining a competitive edge and helping advance the field as a whole. Overall I hope companies lean towards the open-source mindset. Working on problems that someone else has solved is a lot less fun than pushing the frontier.
pargon 12y ago
Walmart Labs talks about wanting to bring in great engineers, and yet they make prospective engineers piss in a cup. Glad they've got their priorities sorted out.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  Is this true? Walmart Labs was sounding pretty good to me after reading the rest of this thread, but I would never work for a company that does drug testing. If anyone has the true story here I'd be interested to hear it.
  - objclxt 12y ago
    Walmart do say on their hiring page that they require a drug test unless prohibited by state law[1]. I would assume it applies to their subsidiaries as well. It seems rather unnecessary. I can sort of understand it for jobs that require security clearance or where there's a risk factor (a friend of mine had to do one when he took a tech job at a bank). I don't quite see Walmart fitting into that category though. [1]: https://hiringcenter.walmartstores.com/OnlineHiringCenter/disclaimers2.jsp https://hiringcenter.walmartstores.com/OnlineHiringCenter/di...
  - pargon 12y ago
    Yep. My roommate got an offer from them last year. That offer was contingent upon a drug test. He ended up going with another offer.
  - shanemhansen 12y ago
    I can confirm they do drug tests.
  - freyr 12y ago
    > but I would never work for a company that does drug testing. I wouldn't drug test employees, but I can understand why some companies might be compelled to do so. I have friends who smoke pot recreationally, and they're fine. I have also had friends/coworkers who became genuinely addicted to drugs, and very consistently they ended up as ticking time bombs for their employers. Things didn't end poorly, they ended disastrously. I know that's not always the case, and that it doesn't justify drug screening everyone, and that it's an unpopular opinion here. But I've seen enough that I know why some employers think it's worth it.
drawkbox 12y ago
The community is having a great discussion around “remote work”. You see the dichotomy of companies such as Slack who build products that happen to enable better remote communication, but who hire people to co-located buildings. As soon as you get beyond a few people, you are working “remotely”. If you aren’t in the same room you will have your main workflow happening through tooling. Yes, you can get together to meet face to face on topics, but that isn’t your general workflow. Never heard such glory come from anything associated with Walmart before. Remote working is what you do everyday even if you are 'co-located in the same building', or same company different building. To top it off all your customers are remote, get your communication and systems in check to also do remote, it gives an external view like no other on your product, and gives all your product engineers a lab to work in.
- lsaferite 12y ago
  I was having a conversation last month about Walmart Labs. apparently they try very hard to point out they are NOT Walmart. :)
  - snsr 12y ago
    Somehow I don't find that surprising at all. http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...
    - lsaferite 12y ago
      Apparently they have a hard time recruiting as well due to the name.
      - lightbritefight 12y ago
        Thats understandable. Walmarts brand is pretty much defined as "We treat our employees poorly, but look how cheap things are." I wouldn't consider either of those factors good selling points for an employer.
plinkplonk 12y ago
" but we could bring in a world class team of engineers who were desperate to build very large scale node services." The word "desperate" is interesting. Are engineers really desperate to build "very large scale node services" (or whatever)?
- edwinnathaniel 12y ago
  1. Yes but only if technology 'X' is in-demand 2. Yes but only for those who like to try new technology and gets paid having fun :)
asadotzler 12y ago
Dion's a smart guy and a great communicator and I'm really excited that he's been pushing hard at Walmart Labs since moving on from Mozilla (and Palm.) Walmart does things at scale and if they can bring some of that strength to open source, even just improving business understanding of open source (ideally a lot more, as Dion expians) that's nothing but solid good for the world.
jyz 12y ago
a group of amazing engineers, unfortunately, many are leaving
- 59nadir 12y ago
  Why?
CmonDev 12y ago
"The supply doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent." Here we go again. Please stop lying! Property supply also doesn't meet demand, guess what happens to prices? Salaries are static => no major demand.
- tormeh 12y ago
  "The supply [of 10x+ programmers] doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent." People who say this kind of thing won't look twice at someone with a bachelor in Java and C++.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Price elasticity is also a factor. Increasing demand does not guarantee increasing ability to pay.
yitchelle 12y ago
"One quick anecdote: a great engineer that I know well was recruited to work for a top class company. They basically lost him when he was told that he would be working with an old Java stack and his workflow would not be git based. The tools matter." How prevalent is this for "great engineer" looking for work? I guess that this type of criteria would only be restricted for those working in the web based. Other industries, not so much? For me, a great engineer is someone who can create a great product with whatever tools are available for them to use.
- jedrek 12y ago
  Yes... but if you're a good engineer, why would you work with shitty tools? All things being equal, why would you choose to work with tools you find frustrating when you can work with tools you like? That's the point: tools matter, and by holding on to crappy tools, you might be giving people a reason to not work with you.
  - yitchelle 12y ago
    Because, sometimes, shitty tools is all you have to work with. I work in embedded systems, and some of the tools I have available is absolutely the shittiest. Imagine debugging a realtime OS on a 8bit micro by flashing an error code through a LED.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Drakim 12y ago
      But is that because you don't have any other options available, or because your company told you to use inferior tools?
      - yitchelle 12y ago
        This was the only option. The other debugging options were too intrusive and would colour the information.
gnu8 12y ago
Are Walmart Labs engineers locked in the store overnight and forced to work off the clock?
mattlutze 12y ago
Am I the only person that read through a good portion of that and didn't actually come away understanding "Why (walmart labs) runs an open source program"? It looks from their website like they have some really interesting work that they've published, but I'm not sure what the utility in this sort of PR fluff piece is.

163 points by jamesgpearce 12y ago

You know what's cooler than working for Walmart? Working on disrupting Walmart, and forcing them to increase the quality of the products they sell to keep competing.

scott_karana 12y ago
Huh? They're competing just fine by keeping prices down, which is what most consumers look for first. You'd have to disrupt our current socioeconomic situation. So unless you can beat their prices and their quality, good luck.
- pkaye 12y ago
  I do that by going to Costco much as possible.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Costco has something like 1% of the product selection that Walmart has.. let alone online purchases... Given, I tend to order a lot via Amazon, but no brick and mortar store comes close to the U.S. market penetration that Walmart has. Most of the population (mid-high 90's iirc) is within 5 miles of a Walmart. Say what you will, but they're probably about the only shopping choice in competition with the likes of Amazon.
    - meric 12y ago
      http://www.bookdepository.com http://www.bookdepository.com sells books for cheaper for free shipping to Australia and is much better than Amazon for books IMHO.
      - darrenmc 12y ago
        The book depository is owned by Amazon
      - tracker1 12y ago
        Which is fine, but I didn't mention books.
- objclxt 12y ago
  > Huh? They're competing just fine by keeping prices down, which is what most consumers look for first I dispute that. If consumers looked to price first everyone reading this would be using a ChromeBook, but I imagine a sizable number are using MacBooks instead. A more generic example: some consumers will buy the cheapest possible clothing, but most consumers look to a reasonable compromise of price and quality.
  - copperx 12y ago
    This is an obtuse simplification. I would be happy with a Chromebook if I didn't happen to be a developer. Also, it's not easy for the layperson to measure the quality of groceries. A lettuce is a lettuce, so I'll buy it where it's cheaper.
  - tvmalsv 12y ago
    Just because you're price sensitive, that doesn't mean that you'll buy something you don't want, just because it's cheaper than what you do want. There's been plenty of research that shows most people are more interested in lower prices than making some sort of social statement.
    - wildgift 12y ago
      True. I think most people want the lowest price for a specific branded product. They start off by deciding, more or less, on getting a certain level of perceived quality, and then finding low prices. The price is secondary to making the decision to purchase a product. As far as making a "social statement" - buying most recognizable or branded products is a kind of social statement. If it weren't, we wouldn't have such a diverse selection of cars, clothes and laptops.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - knowaveragejoe 12y ago
    That's perhaps one of the worst examples you could give to support your argument. The vast majority of people are not developers or otherwise employed in well compensated IT jobs. They most certainly look to price first when it comes to personal computers.
vinceguidry 12y ago
Disrupt Wal-mart? Best laugh I had all day.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

The majority of great engineers have GitHub profiles and have been working on projects there (open source and otherwise). The stack has become ubiquitous, and the majority of engineers either like it, or are “happy” enough with it. There are a few grey beards that rant on about Perforce or something else… but that is pretty rare :) The majority of great engineers... in what field? Web development? Probably. Some language communities are also disproportionately represented. As a whole though, I can't buy that everyone has been totally assimilated into GitHub. I also like how everything other than GitHub (not even Git) and Perforce has just about spontaneously evaporated according to this paragraph.

briholt 12y ago
Classic selection and confirmation bias. I have a GitHub profile > I'm great > I only hire great people > I only hire people with a GitHub profile > Everyone I hire is great and has a GitHub profile > Everyone who is great has a GitHub profile.
objclxt 12y ago
Agreed. You need to recognize that there are some of the best engineers in the world work at companies where they aren't able to put code on GitHub, or it isn't worth it for them. You're working on something secretive, you have a family and want to spend your free time with then rather than weekends dealing with pull requests, etc.
- lultimouomo 12y ago
  This mindset also creates and incentive for employers to keep their engineers from working on open source as much as possible, so that they don't look attractive to other employers and are never able to jump ship / ask a pay raise. In general, I think it is a very lazy and ineffective answer to the "interviewing is hard" problem.
codeonfire 12y ago
I must be in the minority. I am the greatest engineer in all fields, and I don't use github because my job is not github friendly. I only say I'm the greatest because, hey, if we are throwing around value judgements about engineers I'm going to grab me some. Actually, I wish that practice would stop. Every blogger seems to know who is the greatest, and not surprisingly it's always themselves and people they know using the same technology as they are.

Flux159 12y ago

I'm not going to comment on who is writing the article because that's not the point. I think this is a good article pushing for more open source development at traditionally large enterprise software companies. It helps the open source community and it helps the company attract talent. It also gives good advice to large enterprises saying that they shouldn't just throw their code into open source without good documentation and community engagement. At the very least its a good start for companies that would have otherwise kept all their code internally. Just because the article mentions Walmart Labs working on hapi (apparently an express-like nodejs framework) doesn't mean that HN should suddenly disregard the content of the article (as some of the other comments seem to be doing).

mathattack 12y ago
Good points. This can be a good article for people in large companies who need to justify Open Source efforts.
- bglazer 12y ago
  Yep I plan to post this to my company's intranet social network. My understanding is that our company's policies prohibit contributing to the open source projects we use.
- spydum 12y ago
  im afraid this article will fall on deaf ears to those folks. most c-level folks are all about protecting intellectual property and racking up patents. indeed, there are special little ceremonies for patent awards, along with bonus at most enterprise corps.
- leppr 12y ago
  If you have 40 minutes to waste, this talk from a Facebook manager talks about this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk

kevan 12y ago

There's an interesting balance between maintaining a competitive edge and helping advance the field as a whole. Overall I hope companies lean towards the open-source mindset. Working on problems that someone else has solved is a lot less fun than pushing the frontier.

pargon 12y ago

Walmart Labs talks about wanting to bring in great engineers, and yet they make prospective engineers piss in a cup. Glad they've got their priorities sorted out.

Stratoscope 12y ago
Is this true? Walmart Labs was sounding pretty good to me after reading the rest of this thread, but I would never work for a company that does drug testing. If anyone has the true story here I'd be interested to hear it.
- objclxt 12y ago
  Walmart do say on their hiring page that they require a drug test unless prohibited by state law[1]. I would assume it applies to their subsidiaries as well. It seems rather unnecessary. I can sort of understand it for jobs that require security clearance or where there's a risk factor (a friend of mine had to do one when he took a tech job at a bank). I don't quite see Walmart fitting into that category though. [1]: https://hiringcenter.walmartstores.com/OnlineHiringCenter/disclaimers2.jsp https://hiringcenter.walmartstores.com/OnlineHiringCenter/di...
- pargon 12y ago
  Yep. My roommate got an offer from them last year. That offer was contingent upon a drug test. He ended up going with another offer.
- shanemhansen 12y ago
  I can confirm they do drug tests.
- freyr 12y ago
  > but I would never work for a company that does drug testing. I wouldn't drug test employees, but I can understand why some companies might be compelled to do so. I have friends who smoke pot recreationally, and they're fine. I have also had friends/coworkers who became genuinely addicted to drugs, and very consistently they ended up as ticking time bombs for their employers. Things didn't end poorly, they ended disastrously. I know that's not always the case, and that it doesn't justify drug screening everyone, and that it's an unpopular opinion here. But I've seen enough that I know why some employers think it's worth it.

drawkbox 12y ago

The community is having a great discussion around “remote work”. You see the dichotomy of companies such as Slack who build products that happen to enable better remote communication, but who hire people to co-located buildings. As soon as you get beyond a few people, you are working “remotely”. If you aren’t in the same room you will have your main workflow happening through tooling. Yes, you can get together to meet face to face on topics, but that isn’t your general workflow. Never heard such glory come from anything associated with Walmart before. Remote working is what you do everyday even if you are 'co-located in the same building', or same company different building. To top it off all your customers are remote, get your communication and systems in check to also do remote, it gives an external view like no other on your product, and gives all your product engineers a lab to work in.

lsaferite 12y ago
I was having a conversation last month about Walmart Labs. apparently they try very hard to point out they are NOT Walmart. :)
- snsr 12y ago
  Somehow I don't find that surprising at all. http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...
  - lsaferite 12y ago
    Apparently they have a hard time recruiting as well due to the name.
    - lightbritefight 12y ago
      Thats understandable. Walmarts brand is pretty much defined as "We treat our employees poorly, but look how cheap things are." I wouldn't consider either of those factors good selling points for an employer.

plinkplonk 12y ago

" but we could bring in a world class team of engineers who were desperate to build very large scale node services." The word "desperate" is interesting. Are engineers really desperate to build "very large scale node services" (or whatever)?

edwinnathaniel 12y ago
1. Yes but only if technology 'X' is in-demand 2. Yes but only for those who like to try new technology and gets paid having fun :)

asadotzler 12y ago

Dion's a smart guy and a great communicator and I'm really excited that he's been pushing hard at Walmart Labs since moving on from Mozilla (and Palm.) Walmart does things at scale and if they can bring some of that strength to open source, even just improving business understanding of open source (ideally a lot more, as Dion expians) that's nothing but solid good for the world.

jyz 12y ago

a group of amazing engineers, unfortunately, many are leaving

59nadir 12y ago
Why?

CmonDev 12y ago

"The supply doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent." Here we go again. Please stop lying! Property supply also doesn't meet demand, guess what happens to prices? Salaries are static => no major demand.

tormeh 12y ago
"The supply [of 10x+ programmers] doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent." People who say this kind of thing won't look twice at someone with a bachelor in Java and C++.
tedunangst 12y ago
Price elasticity is also a factor. Increasing demand does not guarantee increasing ability to pay.

yitchelle 12y ago

"One quick anecdote: a great engineer that I know well was recruited to work for a top class company. They basically lost him when he was told that he would be working with an old Java stack and his workflow would not be git based. The tools matter." How prevalent is this for "great engineer" looking for work? I guess that this type of criteria would only be restricted for those working in the web based. Other industries, not so much? For me, a great engineer is someone who can create a great product with whatever tools are available for them to use.

jedrek 12y ago
Yes... but if you're a good engineer, why would you work with shitty tools? All things being equal, why would you choose to work with tools you find frustrating when you can work with tools you like? That's the point: tools matter, and by holding on to crappy tools, you might be giving people a reason to not work with you.
- yitchelle 12y ago
  Because, sometimes, shitty tools is all you have to work with. I work in embedded systems, and some of the tools I have available is absolutely the shittiest. Imagine debugging a realtime OS on a 8bit micro by flashing an error code through a LED.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Drakim 12y ago
    But is that because you don't have any other options available, or because your company told you to use inferior tools?
    - yitchelle 12y ago
      This was the only option. The other debugging options were too intrusive and would colour the information.

gnu8 12y ago

Are Walmart Labs engineers locked in the store overnight and forced to work off the clock?

mattlutze 12y ago

Am I the only person that read through a good portion of that and didn't actually come away understanding "Why (walmart labs) runs an open source program"? It looks from their website like they have some really interesting work that they've published, but I'm not sure what the utility in this sort of PR fluff piece is.