Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

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It's a mix of things. For one, I'm kind of allergic to marketing-speak, and the relentlessly positive and enthusiastic tone typical of it grates after a while.

But the other is that I'm not currently the kind of engineer who would want to work at Quora. Right now, I'm more of a tools / low-level guy than a web guy, and I'm pretty close to the machine (at this very moment, I'm writing an x86-64 disassembler). Doing development (rather than testing or debugging) on an EC2 instance is not something I would like to do; nor would I like being more or less forced (via peer pressure if nothing else) to use a Mac (I run Windows almost exclusively on my 2nd gen Mac Air) and develop with vi, Emacs or TextMate. I far prefer a powerful desktop with multiple monitors to any laptop + external monitor, and I like and appreciate what an IDE with integrated debugger does for productivity (though that's much more the case in non-dynamic languages).

There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be counter-cultural at all, it's just there isn't a need for that given the languages we work in. I also have 2 Windows machines at home, 1 Ubuntu VM, 2 Ubuntu machines (although one died), access to CentOS, and recently got an MacBook Air for home too. I thought I would be best at my work with a MBP and chose that among my options between a Mac/PC.

It's true that we don't have that many requirements at that low-level right now, but we certainly do have some work done lower than the web-stack -- we even got an ex-Ksplice engineer joining us to help with that.

But maybe I could also have included some of the deficiencies too, to make it a little more balanced--I agree with you it does seem too rosy with what I had mentioned, but overall the experience has been really positive. I've tried to keep things as real as possible, no-holds barred, instead of being filled with corporate imagery. So you can see the messy desks, cardboard boxes, boring food, lack of 6-core Xeons with 12GB RAMs :)

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