I didn't get the job so maybe they were just joking around with me - but the general despair that they evinced about their data situation makes me wonder!
YouTube uses mySQL but they've also rewritten major portions for scalability. (Vitess)
Just because a company is using a technology you've heard of doesn't mean it's what you expect.
I imagine this is some very old info(like 10 yo) and could change since then?
Vitess seemed to be working for them for a long time.
I do not know any other reason.
Disclaimer: Vitess Maintainer
Yes
There are a lot of vanity projects that get someone promoted for the wrong reasons
That only get broadcasted because that's the newsworthy. You won't get up voted when you share a small story about someone did hard problem and get promoted.
Overwhelmingly, people get promoted because they solve challenging problems with meaningful impact. That's how capitalism and modern corporation work.
But above the baseline there is a lot of errors, exceptions, and manipulations. Because that's how people do everyday: they want to game the system for their own gains. Human nature. There are just so many of them because big corps are big. And that's why big corps eventually lost their vigor.
The best way to combat promotion bullshit and other corporate bullshit, it's to recognize them, call them out in the right technique (being diplomatic and protect yourself) and don't practice yourself.
Yes, don't practice the bullshit. That's extraordinarily difficult.
It's because solutions don't exist to meet their unique requirements which often you don't get visibility of unless you're in the team.
But of course that will never stop HN commenters assuming they know better about the situation than the engineers and managers that work there.
It's key to ask, does the promotion (or strong performance rating) happen before the impact or after?
You can deliver Project X that will save $YY Million dollars. Everyone agrees the impact is "there", the complexity is there. Launch a PoC to a handful of use cases, realize most of that impact, then move onto something else. PoC works for those use cases, never becomes a complete solution, and slowly develops issues. Once it has enough issues, someone else can solve the problem again for the even more impact assuming the problem space has grown since the initial launch.
Capitalism works when there's competition and cost for (long-term) failure. Neither are guaranteed to exist if you're at a Big Corp that's printing money.
Disagree
Big Corp print money still squeeze employees. See the record profit & revenue and 10k+ layoffs.
mySQL == Oracle now... so bad on theological grounds.
What the GP alludes to is interesting though - mythologising of organisations, brands and names.
Spend enough time with "famous" people, "big names", centres of power and prominence and you quickly see everyone is just ordinary dudes doing ordinary things with ordinary gear. But for some reason there's fuck loads of money and attention, and sometimes cloying paranoia and adulation floating around.
Sure, right out on the periphery are a noble few who play with particle accelerators, spaceships and bunker supercomputers. But then, that's just a day job too.
True genius/exceptionalism is rare and found in the unexpected places. The rest is conjured out of thin air by marketing and PR people, the press, and commentators. They are the ones who need the big legend.