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niemandhier

People here keep claiming “Anything is possible with unlimited budget”.

Cerns budget is 1.4 billion Euro, 50 million Euro for all IT infrastructure.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/2888205/files/English.pdf#page18

It’s not the money, it’s the people. Update: Added source.

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That kind of place can draw a certain kind of employee. This finding is hard to transfer to commercial projects. Sure employees will always claim to be really motivated, especially in the marketing material, but are they we-are-nerds-working-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-human-knowledge-motivated?

Probably not, but there is surely some manager out there who made themselves believe they can motivate their employees to show the same devotion for the self-made hardships of some mostely pointless SaaS product. If you want to grab that kind of spirit, what you do needs to fundamentally make sense beyond just making somebody money.

That’s a great observation, and I think generally correct, but there are private companies where that sort of motivation exists, for basically the same reason

Then they get bought by some megacorp which kills the motivation.

Or they are the megacorp that killed it (Google, Xerox?)

That's exactly how we were able to go to the moon in 55 years ago. And why it's complicated today. It was of course lot of money. But it was mostly a lot of highly skilled, motivated devoted people doing for an ultimate common goal. Money would not have been sufficient by itself.

In other words, if you permit, pure capitalism isn't a sufficiently good motive to get something significant done. But of course most of us don't work towards an ultimate common goal – and neither did most people in those times. One wonders if there is enough meaning left these days to go 'round and ensure most of us feel passionate about the stuff we (have to) do. Maybe we really need a god or war or common enemy to unite all strands into a strong rope.

Since then, a LOT of the smart motivated people have been lured into either banking or adtech. The pay is good and the technical problems can be pretty interesting but the end result lacks that "wow factor".

Fingers crossed that next century we'll look at our current banking and adtech and go: Wow - that was unbelievably sad and dumb.

I also read that nowadays we are more risk averse and many people/manager/companies are mostly administrators of status quo. Pair that with lack of vision and public engagement for current challenges to humanity.

Also, CERN does not have a profit motive.

How much good work have the people reading this thread had to trash because it didn't align with Q3 OKRs? How much time and energy did they put into garbage solutions because they had to hit a KPI by the last day of June?

> Also, CERN does not have a profit motive.

This is a great point. We work with CERN on a project, and we're all volunteers, but we work on something we need, and contribute back to it wholeheartedly.

At the end of the day, CERN wants to give away project governance to someone else in the group, because they don't want to be the BDFL of anything they help creating. It allows them to pursue new and shiny things and build them.

There's an air consisting of "it's done when it's done", and "we need this, so we should build this without watering it down", so projects move at a steady pace, but the code and product is always as high quality as possible.

CERN buddy of mine suggested that exposing a colony of physicists to elevated ambient levels of helium would trigger excessive infrastructure building behavior.

People get this very wrong, CERN is extremely underfunded. People really don't understand how expensive running the accelerators is and most of the budget goes to that. Last years they even had to run for less months than expected because they couldn't afford the rising energy prices.

The buildings are old, the offices suck, you don't even get free coffee and they pay less than the norm in Switzerland. But they have some of the top minds working on very specific and interesting systems, dealing with problems you'd never encounter anywhere else.

I would like to yap more about the current management and their push/reliance on enterprise solutions but to cut it short I really do think cern is a net contributor to open science and they deserve more funding.

CERN was a good example of how much can be done with how little when you have the right people.

For a long time, the entire Linux distribution (Scientific Linux) used for ~15K collaborators, the infra and the grid computing was managed by a team of around 4-5 people.

The teams managing the network access (LanDB), the distributed computing system, the scientific framework (ROOT) and the storage are also small, dedicated skilled teams.

And the result speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, most of that went to shit quite recently when they replaced the previous head of IT by a Microsoft fanboy/girl coming from outside of the scientific environment. The first thing he/she did was to force Microsoft bloatware everywhere to replace existing working OSS solutions.

> Unfortunately, most of that went to shit quite recently when they replaced the previous head of IT by a Microsoft fanboy(girl?) coming from outside of the scientific environment.

Painful to read so I did a short check. From a news post I don’t want to link here, but easily found searching “CERN, the famous scientific lab where the web was born, tells us why it's ditching Microsoft and helping others do the same”, direction taken in 2019 seemed quite the opposite. I am not sure how current head of IT at CERN, Enrica Porcari, fits in to the story. Insider info will be appreciated.

> direction taken in 2019 seemed quite the opposite

The head of IT changed in 2021 if it answers your question.

Don’t see any previous experience at Microsoft [2]. Just a self taught fan then?

Edit: “Partnership is the art of understanding shared value. In WFP we have a number of partnerships, not many, but the ones that we have are deep, are sustained, are long-term. And definitely UNICC is one of them. Enrica Porcari, Chief Information Officer and Director Technology Division at the WFP” [1]

United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) is a Microsoft shop. Legit to assume, if OP statement holds true, she got the business sponsorship going while CIO at the World Food Program (WFP).

This kind of attempted executive takeover is always the strategy of a team. Who sponsored and voted for her at CERN is the real person of interest.

1. https://www.unicc.org/our-values/what-makes-us-unique/

2. https://cgnet.com/blog/former-cgnet-employee-enrica-porcari-...

Joachim Mnich, Director for Research and Computing and her boss [4], holds the position also since January 2021 [1]. Mike Lamont, Director for Accelerators and Technology, also got the job at the same time [2]. Finally Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General, in 2019 extended her tenure for a second term “to start on 1st January 2021” [3].

So in 2019 the initiative to remove Microsoft began. With renewal and promotions taking in to effect it stopped. Interesting. Feeling a strong Microsoft US vs Munich DE vibe. With a twitch of IT.

1. https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-people/biographies/jo...

2. https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-people/biographies/mi...

3. https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-people/biographies/fa...

4. https://german-dac.web.cern.ch/sites/default/files/2022.01%2...

“newly created CERN Venture Connect programme (CVC), launched in 2023 […] In establishing CVC, CERN’s Entrepreneurship team entered discussions with Microsoft, with the aim to better leverage the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub“ [1].

Under the purview of Christopher Hartley, Director of Industry, Procurement & Knowledge Transfer (IPT) [2], Microsoft is gaining more footholds at CERN. Won’t be too far fetched to consider Mr Hartley and Ms Porcari as working together to achieve some sort of common good.

1. https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/journey-cern-e...

2. https://german-dac.web.cern.ch/sites/default/files/2022.01%2...

There was a huge initiative at CERN to move to non-MS products.

It was great actually: suddenly we were leaving behind a bunch of bloated MS cruft and working with nice stuff. As someone working at CERN I was really inspired, not just by the support for open source but by how well it all worked.

Then next thing I knew we were doubling down on MS stuff. I don't know what happened. It was sad though, and the user experience did not improve in the end.

I'm not close enough to CERN-IT to know the details. But for what it's worth, no one I knew in IT could think of a good reason for going back.

Considering how massively in bed with the U.S. government and other governments that Microsoft is, and said government has been known for keeping tabs even on allies(1), I'm sure that certain parties have a keen interest in keeping up with what's going on at CERN that's not just scientific curiosity. Strangely these Microsoft evangelists manage to pop up in organizations all the time to reverse any open source initiatives. Could just be a coincidence though.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

I think the majority of the Scientific Linux software came from Fedora/Red Hat and the Linux kernel. Planning and managing the CERN computing infrastructure is a lot of work, then updating and releasing a famous distro on top of that was impressive.

Scientific Linux was originally a product of Fermilab, with contributions from CERN.

Also, the in-kind contributions from hundreds of institutes around the world. Much can, and has, been said about physicist code, but CERN is the center of a massive community of “pre-dropout” geniuses. I can’t count the number of former students that later joined Google and the likes. Many are frequenting HN.

> Cerns budget is 1.4 billion Euro

Kind of weird that a company like Uber has a valuation of $150 billion Euro.

Apples to oranges. Budget is per year, valuation is total.

A better comparison would be Uber's revenue of $37 billion in 2023.

I don't see why it's Apples to oranges. Uber could pay for 150 CERN-years.

No, they could not.

Valuation is not money in the bank. It does not even represent an amount that is convertible to an equal amount of liquid currency.

It's a number that is hardly useful for anything and I'm tired of people cooking up all sorts of nonsense with it.

Ok, maybe it's 75 CERN years or maybe even 10. The point still stands.

PS: Sorry if you got tired, but I'm tired of people explaining what valuation isn't when we're just talking orders of magnitude.

it's only useful for getting loans that you'll pay back with a bigger loan. it's how rich people are always cash-poor but wealthy and live wealthy lifestyles.

How many people ordering a meal (often out of laziness) per day vs thinking and searching the mysteries of universe? Economically it makes sense that Uber generates a lot more of cash.

I think you misinterpreted that there shall be a correlation between _valuation_ and _earnings_. Ubers _first_ ever positive year was 2013, after 15 years in business [1] . Uber may be generating cash, but it's also loosing (lost) cash a lot faster than it was generating it. By taking 2013 as reference (~2 billion), it needs another 5 of those years just to recover from its losses in 2012 (9 billion). I understand the economics behind it, but its valuation is way out of reality.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...

Most of the people who make CERN work aren't working for CERN. The IT department is under CERN, but there are many thousands of "users" who don't get payed by CERN at all. Quite a lot of the fabrication and most of the physics analysis is done by national labs and universities around the world.

CERN budget on experiment level is being paid mostly by contributions from the institutions that is part of this experiment. I am talking about operation, R&D and this would also include personnel contributions to different aspect. There is also service work that each one of the users must do beside doing physics. I am for example work on software development stack beside my current physics analysis. Some of my colleagues working on hardware.

Then there are country level contributions that pays for CERN infrastructure and maintenance (and inter experiment stuff) and direct employees salaries.

The important point here is that (I believe) the 1.4 billion above doesn't account for all the work done directly by institutes. Institutes pay CERN, but they also channel government grants to fund a huge amount of work directly.

Most of the people I know who "worked at" CERN never got a pay check that said CERN on it.

Yes, but that still covers infrastructure (cables) and a lot of equipment for the experiments including but not limited to massive storage and tape backup, distributed local compute, and local cluster management all with users busy trying to pummel it with the latest and greatest ideas of how they can use it faster and better... Not to mention specialist software and licences. 50M doesn't go that far when you factor all of this in

That being said, though, members contribute more than money. A lot of the work done at CERN is not done on CERN budgets, but on the budgets of member institutes.

Good hiring managers can find the hidden gems. These are typically people who don't have the resume to join FAANG immediately, due to lacking the pedigree, but who have lots of potential. Also these same people typically don't last long because they do eventually move on.

Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tech that if you want to do some cutting edge tech you are almost forced to join a public institution because private ones are not doing anything exciting.

Because doing the millionth CRUD in USA is very exciting?

One wonders if things win because they really are better, or because there's sufficient financial momentum behind them. I have worked in the public sector for some years, and I don't think Europe is behind, just that the budgets are a lot smaller. If you want to capture a lot of people in an ecosystem or walled garden, you're going to need money, and lots of it. For all that's good and bad about it, most of that excess is concentrated in the US, in a few hotspots. No need to get distracted and put a flag on somebody like a Zuckerberg or Jobs or Gates though.

> and I don't think Europe is behind, just that the budgets are a lot smaller. If you want to capture a lot of people in an ecosystem or walled garden, you're going to need money, and lots of it

And the initial market you have is quite a bit smaller. Germany is the biggest EU country by population at 84 million, compared to 333 million in the US. Moving into another EU country means translating into a different language, verifying what laws apply to you, how taxes work, etc. Sometimes it's easy (just a translation), sometimes you might have to redo everything almost from scratch (e.g. Doctolib which schedule healthcare appointments, do meetings online with doctors, can be used to share test results, prescriptions - each new country they enter will have a lot of regulations on healthcare data that will need to be applied).

But it's mostly the budgets.

Are you forgetting about the single market thing?

You can sell everywhere without figuring out how taxes work.

You think in USA healthcare is unified? When every single hospital is a separate entity? Hihihihihi, you're joking right?

> You can sell everywhere without figuring out how taxes work.

You have to figure out VAT for each country. And any local regulations and laws that apply to your business.

> You think in USA healthcare is unified

Irrelevant. There isn't an entirely separate set of laws and rules that govern healthcare and related data applying to each different hospital or locale. HIPAA is the big thing that applies to everyone. In the EU, you can't even read the related laws for a different country without bilingual lawyers to translate it to you.

> You have to figure out VAT for each country.

Look, yo clearly have no experience with this. No you don't. That's just made up.

I have no further interest in discussing with you if you are here just to do disinformation.

> Irrelevant. There isn't an entirely separate set of laws

Lol. You think states have uniform legislation in USA.

Before telling us how the world works, it'd be best to learn how it works. Your mental model is rather different from the reality.

> Look, yo clearly have no experience with this. No you don't. That's just made up.

Enjoy the reading:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...

https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/where-tax_en

That's a lot of conditions, rules, and exceptions depending on what you're trading and from where to where.

> You think states have uniform legislation in USA

They don't, but there's lots of overlap, especially in high level areas like healthcare.

> Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tech that if you want to do some cutting edge tech you are almost forced to join a public institution because private ones are not doing anything exciting.

This is genuinely cringeworthy. Do you think that companies in the EU all use COBOL on mainframes and nothing newer than 10 years old is allowed? Airlines and banks here(!) are rewriting their apps to be Kubernetes native... And have been doing so for years. Amadeus (top 2 airline booking software in the world) were a top Kubernetes contributor already a decade ago.

The tech problems being solved at Criteo, Revolut, Thales, BackMarket, Airbus, Amadeus (to name a few fun ones off the top of my head) are no less challenging and bleeding edge than... "the Uber of X" app number 831813 in the US. Or fucking Juicero or Theranos or any of the other scams.

A lot of teleco hardware comes from Europe. Without that, you would using your hardware as doorstoppers.

>Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tec

How's Boeing doing?

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