Comment by jamwt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamwt | Hacker News Reader

I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air.

There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy to assume we did this whole thing ourselves. Especially given very generous phrasing at times like "Turner rebuilt Magic Pocket in an entirely different programming language".

The full picture is James and I were very fortunate to work with a team of more than a dozen amazing engineers on this project, that lead designs and implementations of key parts of it, and that stayed just as late at the office as we did during crunch time. In particular, the contributions of the SREs didn't make it into the article. And managing more than half a million disks without an incredible SRE team is basically impossible.

Couldn't agree with this more.

One of the things that's not immediately apparent in an initiative like this is the huge amount of effort required to provision, deploy and manage a system of this scale, across a whole bunch of different teams. We couldn't have done any of this without a tremendous group of SREs with the wisdom to invest heavily in automation, in addition to all the hard work.

We'll follow up in a week or two with a blog post highlighting some of the work here. I think the framework for disk remediation (automatically detecting failures, re-provisioning, etc) is particularly interesting.

As the SRE writing the blog post on disk lifecycle, I can confirm it amongst others are in flight. :)

Is it true a girl broke your arm while arm wrestling?

Haha, who am I to argue with a story like that?

Nice of you to call this out. I think everyone understands that not all of the people involved will get mentioned by name in a Wired article. A project like this clearly isn't a four person operation, and hopefully most people realize there are always a bunch of people working behind the scenes.

My only disappointment is that by trying to set a PR friendly narrative, Dropbox greatly compressed the time spent on the project from inception to completion, and that erases a lot of people's involvement. As someone who worked on MP when it actually was a four person project, it's a little frustrating to finally be able to talk about it after all this time while at the same time the public perception is that the project began after I left the company.

Very classy to be this transparent about what constitutes a team effort. The common narratives that focus on one or a very small number of visible people has a self-reinforcing effect where those key people get more name recognition and in turn that leads to them being even more visible the next time the team accomplishes something. It's rare for team leaders to step forward and to acknowledge the fact that it really was a team effort.

What does SRE mean?

I assume Site Reliability Engineer from the last time I looked at their openings. I didn't look at the description, but I assume it's a more formal description for devops?

devops is not a job title. It is a way of doing things.

Except it is actually a job title at all sorts of places.

And if you google it, you'll see plenty of discussion around why that's controversial.

https://www.google.com/search?q=devops+job+title&ie=utf-8&oe...

Whether it's controversial or not has no bearing on the fact that it is at this point a time most certainly a job title.

"devops engineer" is most certainly a job title. Devops is analogous with "agile" when talking about process...

One thing I'll grant Agile is that there's a great deal more standardized technical topics and standards meaning expectations when using the term. With devops, there's a massive difference between how big companies (old, archaic companies by tech company standards) perceive of it compared to how smaller companies do.

My current role was sold to me as a "devops" role with the usual jargon of automation - I can't think of how this role has actually prepared me to pass a serious interview as an SRE at Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, or other tech companies. What really has happened after looking at all the recruiter spam and some of the interviews I've taken on a lark is that the term has become another way of marketing to engineers with modernized skillsets when they can't retain good ones for more than maybe two months (during which time the engineer is interviewing for another role almost certainly) because good engineers tend to run away from these companies for many legitimately founded reasons.

http://googleforstudents.blogspot.com/2012/06/site-reliabili...

Very cool! Next challenge: shipping without the crunch time and late hours for the team :)

I think most of us figured there'd be more people involved, but it shows lots of class to come post a comment giving credit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com