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Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.

In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.

I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.

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Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.

I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.

Brendan Gregg is somewhat of a systems engineering legend and contributed more to the field than most people could dream of.

Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.

Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.

Conversely, I made HotSpot commits as an intern, but I never shipped a web app.

If you're talking about the HotSpot VM then that is a work of art. You learn a lot studying its codebase.

Yes, you can learn "they should have added value types to this language".

It didn't move the needle for you.

For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".

Yeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a great track record.

And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.

Certainly if you take it in combination with his earlier "Intel is listening" blog post: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen...

Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.

The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.

> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.

It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.

> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.

The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.

I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.

Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.

I can’t tell if he is just good at self promotion or he is just good. But that’s always the case at bigcorp.

Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance

> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.

This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.

If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.

With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.

In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical

Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.

Everything is just a script with some visualization once you come up with the concept.

What concept in particular? There is nothing novel about that tool, it visualizes the stats collected by perf, and as I said it's not even that useful in root cause analysis in performance regressions, which is like the main point it is marketed for.

ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.

that is some brutal self-honesty right there

Especially since they mention being a surgeon in some other comments.

um, no i didn't

I know, just roll with it.

If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?

You can work your entire career and have "no impact" depending on how you define it.

A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads, but have no real impact on the job over their career, for example.

That is because these days what used to be high impact is now table stakes.

That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.

Some people are more productive. Others less so.

There is a tension between the two groups.

Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.

People should try to remember that people post this on their blogs, the way it gets in HN is not always their own doing.

He's arguably the most famous performance engineer. I've followed his work for 15 years.

Screaming at Disk drives has been my go-to party trick to break ice the last decade.

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