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Comment by candeira | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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