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Comment by notakio | Hacker News Reader

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on.

He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 minutes where he had them stand inside a hot aisle that he was just outside of, giving a fantastic soliloquy on the importance of code efficiency, and the consequences of ignoring it. It was hilarious to watch from the comfort of the cold aisle, knowing full well what he was doing.

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What did the software engineers hope to learn from this tour?

The scale of a cloud datacenter is pretty awesome to witness. I had the opportunity to visit a large cloud company’s data center years ago, it was immense in scale and (mostly) very well thought out.

You just reminded me of this video from Google which toured one of their data centers back in 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

Because hardware is cool.

I’m personally of the opinion that everyone who works in software should have to rack a server and bootstrap it. Physically mount it, cable it, and get the *nix distribution of your choice running on it, serving Hello, World.

Everywhere I’ve worked, there is a marked difference in the quality of engineers who had played with hardware - even those who merely had expressed interest in it, and maybe had an RPi - and those who had not. There is something about physically touching the thing that runs your code that makes you better at it. Maybe it’s a correlation between “wants to play with something unnecessary but adjacent” and “curious enough to ask why more frequently,” but I swear, it exists.

I think it maps to the proclivity of the engineer to want to understand the multiple layers that apply to whatever they're working on. The more curious, the more likely that engineer is to gain a better understanding of the whole, and therefore presumably be able to do better engineering.

What was he doing? Showing them that bad code will make them feel hotter?

Busy servers generate more heat. Inefficient code makes servers busier. There’s a real physical outcome for bad performance code at scale.

But you don’t really want lots of idle or underused servers, aside from burst capacity management. So if they universally and consistently wrote more efficient code I’d expect a smaller datacenter. Full of still busy servers but just less of them.

He was showing how complex and expensive a data center is and giving them real-world visceral experience that inefficient code has real-world implications.

Maybe he got PTSD from being a former tour guide and this was his time for vengeance.

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