Unfortunately, 17min to build is pretty good. 17min without a transient infra failure is very good.
Anyways, AMA
The entire company has zero concept of testing. No QA at all. Engineers push out half baked initiatives to add to their promotion packet then move on to the next thing.
I trouble shot so many issues just in day to day usage of the internal tooling like for some reason, engineers just trying to do their jobs, are QA.
Yea, give everything 3x estimate because everything that can break will break along the way.
Fresh clone of master won’t build, the local build command is broken, gradle, remote build, GitHub, staging is an inside joke, prod host os upgrades, dependencies bumped in repo, http dependency’s network route changed, etc. etc. etc.
I feel like this sort of flinging shit over the wall mentality is very much becoming de-facto nowadays. Very often I have been required to just 'get shit done quick and dirty' over spending time to come up with a permanent solution.
Quick and dirty is never the short term fix it is meant to be. It always ends up being left in place until it inevitably breaks down the line.
Theyre still using python 2 and centOS in tons of systems.
They just started using github last year.
Their tech stack is easily over a decade old.
There's 1 service on py2, with a plan to migrate because of the move off of centos. centos deprecation is in progress.
Are you sure about that?
CentOs migration has been in progress for years lol
My biggest pet peeve with this is that a lot of people see these values as immutable, and because building/testing/running every single push takes too long, we should not do that.
As opposed to making builds faster, or build infra faster/cheaper.
* Ship less code (Very hard to get a large org to do)
* Rebuild the same things less often. Requires using build tooling that supports this org wide, Still hard to do but not as hard as shipping less code.
* Build more pieces in parallel. Also requires using build tooling that supports it org wide as well as structuring the code in such a way that it is amenable to parallel building.
These are all expensive investments that will pay off huge if you do them but can be quite difficult to justify until you reach a certain size.
Nonetheless, leadership will never give it priority.
Sometimes doing the same thing with simpler components and fewer components is just better.
There was significant emphasis on code quality at least on the team I was on, and an ever improving culture.
I did work on one voyager task though and I remember it being a nightmare
What precisely is LinkedIn trying to be?
Seems like it's turning into 2007 Facebook. Is that intentional?
I suspect the user base has largely driven it. From the beginning it seemed that regardless of the stated purpose users wanted to use LinkedIn as a "different facebook". Personally I hate that, but a lot of people have been doing it for many years.
Like, LinkedIn only needs MAUs who are trying to sell something or looking for a job, they 100% don't need people to log in every day (as their ads business is only a small proportion of revenue).
Other users (almost everyone I know) absolutely loathe it. It is hands-down the worst service I have an account with, but it's also practically required to get a job if you don't have lucky personal connections. I was hoping TFA was actually about leaving as a user, that it might be inspiration for me to free myself.
But I think users just love / gravitate towards a more facebook style feed.
LinkedIn has slightly different style of spammer, but it's basically the end game for anything.
In what way? Users/customers do not generally drive development. Indirect measurements of users do, such as measuring "engagement".
At best, what likely happened was A/B testing showed "what users want", which rarely and only by chance intersected with what users actually want, and instead showed over and over that socials media patterns (light and dark) hijacking attention drives engagement.
If people didn't want to use twitter, they wouldn't and it would be gone. But users do use it, and even the folks who tell me they're upset ABOUT Twitter, most choose to be there.
Whatever the reason they make that choice, at some point that's on them.
That's not the same thing as wanting to use the platform.
I can't imagine letting a service like that define things for me like that.
Yes, that's very clear. Everyone is super impressed with how free your thinking is.
However, you completely missed the point of my comment by interpreting my hyperbole so literally.
Oh, you meant what are they trying to be that's helpful to the user? Doesn't matter.
its a great learning experience though despite what people say about the inability to learn the new hot hot tech. the nuance of software development is the decisions that other people make, that is inescapable and is a skill worth developing. i'm not buying the "just do a startup" because i think its a cop out.
The initiative Chris refers to is still alive but likely hasn’t made any meaningful progress. These things tend to have a lot of fan fair and then suddenly leave the front conscious of the company as we get a new GDPR/DMA fire to put out. at that point it will be dead. Or, it will stay alive for 2+ years as slowly but surely 50% of clients migrate to it and see even poorer performance.
There was a blog here a few months ago about migration from restli to grpc. It’s still going on, and nearly every app i see is still restli.
you realize stylometry exists, right? even the phrase 'fan fair' is a strong signal.