If you are indeed interested in coming out of retirement, Brendan Gregg does performance engineering at Netflix. It might be worth reaching out.
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-16/working-at-netfl...
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-16/working-at-netfl...
Which is refreshing, the constant whining about Linux vs $SOMEONES_FAVORITE_OS gets old. Very pleasant to have a "just the facts" pile of info. And I learned a few tools that I didn't know about.
However, I feel sad seeing the best tech from Sun going down the drain despite being open source.
As an example of that, because it's fair to go "what??!", I installed some open source solaris in the last few years to play with it. The default install was miserable, the tools were crap. I was having lunch with Bryan Cantrill and some of his team and I mentioned my negative reaction. They laughed and said you have to install the GNU tools and put that in your path first.
Say what? SunOS 4.x came with good tools. In /usr/bin. The default install was useful. Solaris was "standard" in that it came with all the System V stuff in /usr/bin. And Shannon and crew "protected" those standard tools and refused to evolve them to make them useful. They started sucky and stayed sucky all in the name of being "standard". Except nobody else used those tools. There was no other System V based Unix that had any significant volume. *BSD certainly didn't move to System V, Linux wasn't System V, the only System V Unix with any volume was Solaris. So they were standard for no good reason and all these years later Solaris still has crappy stuff in /usr/bin, you want /opt/GNU/bin or something.
Sorry for the rant, and it's off topic. Well maybe it's off topic, maybe not. I sort of wonder if Sun had shipped the GNU stuff and installed it by default as the real tools, would it have made any difference? Probably not but boy, do the default tools make a bad first impression.
No, I always find it interesting to hear stories about people who worked for companies like Sun in the past.
Regards
Since I retired I've been doing some for hire tractor/excavator work (I live above you in the Santa Cruz mountains, have 3 Kubotas) and a lot of wrenching with my mechanic. Who is a decent mechanic but because he's in so much pain he frequently self medicates which makes him not a member of the sharp people team.
So I'm missing the conversations that engineers have. Normal people are fine and all but not as fun as poking at a hard problem with someone smarter than me.
I kinda think the job that might be good for me is helping out a VC firm that funds sort of system stuff, like cloud stuff, I/O stuff, etc. I'm a dinosaur, I like C, I like kernels, I like thinking about I/O and how to scale it. Systems stuff is where I like to be and there don't seem to be too many places that want that anymore. Or I'm just not aware of them.
Brendan if you ever want to go to lunch and yap about lmbench or tell me what you are working on, hey, lunch is on me. We can go to crappy chinese (I used to have offices in the water tower plaza and that's what we called the chinese place that's just up the street from you. It's the best chinese we could find but it's nowhere near as good as San Francisco chinese food, hence the name) or whereever is good, I'd love to find a new good place for food down there.