AbbeFaria

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Try doing the assignments from MIT 6.5840 Distributed Systems course by Morris and Kaashoek.

I am going through this right now. I finished Lab 3. I also made my own notes about some of the papers they discuss, specifically Spanner.

https://sudk1896.github.io/2026/09/03/Spanner-notes.html

Highly recommend this course.

As the old saying at MSFT goes, “Shipping is a feature”.

There are a sizeable number of Meta employees that have jobs due to Zuck’s sheer generosity and the fact that he cares about his public image and laying them off in service of Meta’s bottom line won’t look good.

Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now, of course macroeconomic conditions have changed but layoffs were always a bit taboo in tech.

To all the sheep at Meta who weren’t sacrificed because Zuck thought it would look too bad on him, how do you know your game is up at Meta ?

As a measly backend programmer, I only have a good mental model of a “lock”, think a sync.Mutex in Golang.

But I wanted to go deeper into the rabbit hole and understand concepts like memory ordering and how atomic operations are actually implemented using the abstractions hw provides.

Any book recommendations or exercises I could do to learn more about this. Thanks.

It’s the nature of our jobs. The artefacts we produce, code and documentation are out in the open, available freely for training LLMs.

That’s not true for highly qualified doctors, patient case histories, patient feedback that helps doctors diagnose or treat patients or for surgeons to operate on patients. All of these actions are high stakes, get it wrong and people could die, AI would never be able to replace them.

I know it’s a troll, This was no MOOC. I didn’t even get a certificate.

I saw the job opening in the careers portal and just cold DM’d the HM. As to why I DM’d, what do I have to lose ? I was already working at MSFT in a different team. The worst that could happen was that he would just ignore the message. Also, I didn’t nag the HM, it was just one DM where I summarised the things I did in the course. He then asked me to send me my resume and that was it.

I “audited” CMU 15-445 in April 2026, a few months ago. I then applied to Azure Hyperscale DB team, and as my pitch to get hired I cold DM’d the hiring manager whatever I finished in the assignments (BPM, Concurrent B-tree, Transaction support etc).

With that, I was able to get the interview although I ended up failing it. My lack of experience in C++ was probably one of the main reasons. Your course helped me stand my own during the interview and even though I had zero database experience apart from finishing the course, I felt adequately prepared.

Thank you for making the course open source. As a working professional, it was helpful to be able to do the course on my own time. Suffice to say, I am a big fan of your work and thank you for introducing me (and other fellow learners) to the interesting world of Databases!

I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.

I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.

Reminds me of that scene in Silicon Valley, where they show the optimistic Hooli Ad which Gavin Belson labels a “tampon ad” and then proceeds to blast his entire C-suite to outcompete Pied Piper.

I haven’t watched the lectures yet. Reading the papers and using Claude/GPT to ask for references etc is good enough for me. I did watch a few, ones on GFS and Raft but didn’t see the ROI, lectures are too long. Reading the papers multiple times and reading blogs, references and asking Q’s to GPT is what I am doing.

Obviously for the assignments themselves, I use AI sparingly. Mostly as a sounding board when I have doubts or to know how to do something in golang, since it isn’t my primary programming language.

Note, I am not asking for solutions like “implement Append Entries RPC”, the solutions are public so AI could probably implement everything. My workflow is to implement it first, debug test failures, go through each individual test and then come up with clarifying Q’s, such as the one below,

In Raft paper by Ongaro et al, for the below condition, If there exists an N such that N > commitIndex, a majority of matchIndex[i] ≥ N, and log[N].term == currentTerm: set commitIndex = N (§5.3, §5.4).

Is commitIndex changed only when we receive a successful reply for Append Entries ?

Lastly I have an AGENTS.md that prohibits GPT from giving solutions directly, that would defeat the purpose of doing the assignments. It was used in one of Stanford’s GenAI course, look it up.

+1 to this. I am on Assignment 3D (dealing with log compaction in Raft). I have learnt more about Distributed Systems just by "auditing" this course.

For Paxos, I also recommend reading Paxos v Raft, Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus ? by Heidi Howard et al. It explains Multi-paxos by using the style and abstractions from the Raft paper, which makes it much more understandable. Paxos can be intimidating but this was the paper that made it click for me.

I highly recommend doing the labs from 6.824.

I know the article is AI slop just by the structure, my last job at MSFT had me producing artefacts like this, which is why I quit ;)

The issue with buying land outside major metro areas like BLR are the following,

1. Irregular power supply. I lived 2 hours outside of BLR in a village and the power would regularly go off for minimum of 3 hours, sometimes more. The current KA government made a promise to voters to supply subsidised power and the downstream effect of this is that they must mandatorily supply power to BLR which is the only economic engine of KA. Consequently they end up shafting everyone else.

2. Poor education quality. The best teachers and smartest students are concentrated in BLR, unless you are willing to homeschool or are fine with your child not getting the best, this is a difficult tradeoff to live with.

3. Narrow minded people in villages. Unless you live in touristy areas like Coorg, CKM etc you will not find the diversity that you find in a big city like BLR.

4. Less than ideal medical care. Most villages don’t have the sort of hospitals and doctors you would find in BLR. The best doctors who would be the best paid won’t come to villages. Although I did live near a teaching hospital and the medical care there was average. If you’re a healthy individual, you might ignore this.

Surprisingly the roads were decent, a result of being near a highway and having very low population density.

Apart from these, I was living a “slow life”, had great AQI (most days), wide open spaces, great and cheap food. If you’re fine with the shortcomings, buying land in and around major cities is affordable but the shortcomings I mentioned are real and I don’t see them going away anytime soon.

As to the efforts to decongest BLR, there are quite a few like Bidadi township but they are are more like bringing BLR style haphazard development to the outskirts, but these things are still very much in the nascent stage now.

Meta is a cash generating behemoth. They have such a well oiled ad machine that it’s going to be a long time before they destroy themselves. Case in point, they look fine financially even after burning mountains of cash on the Metaverse.

I would worry about Meta dying only when people stop using IG, which they clearly are NOT. IG is firmly entrenched in modern society and culture, they make insane amounts of money off of that.

One thing is becoming more and more clear though, their AI efforts are going nowhere. I would be interested in where they end up in the AI race, they are never going to get as much mindshare as Claude, Codex or Gemini.

Excess verbiage in communication. Design docs, root cause debriefs etc all are clearly AI generated with little thought to whether they are helpful to the reader. They are certainly helpful to the writer as they can just offload it to the AI.

Its hard to discern the kernel of truth that the author is trying to communicate. So much of documentation is now AI generated and rarely does it help in understanding code bases or diagnosing issues in production.

This was my experience at MSFT for the past year or so.

> So you and OP believe that, these systems are good indicators of skills, so much that the last statement sounds normal?

Op here, yes I do believe, the levels aren’t perfect though. I believe in them because I was once L60 and L61, I knew intimately what was expected of me then and I can assure you the work I was doing as an L63 could be done by someone few levels down, which is to say I was underutilised. The team was also not the right fit for me.

Levels tell you two things, the scope and autonomy you get in your work and more importantly compensation. From the compensation view point, it does tend to be “gamed” frequently by developers hired from outside who might be out earning devs promoted within.

Have no idea why people here are picking up on MSFT’s levelling system? I didn’t invent it.And it actually starts at L59.

The point I made was that as an SSE (L63), there’s a certain amount of scope and autonomy that is expected neither of which I was getting and hence I resigned. I am not trying to bully or denigrate anyone junior.

The levelling system specifies the output and the characteristics of the output expected out of an engineer, that’s it. Whether I believe in it or not is beside the point, I was in the system so I did believe it otherwise progressing through my career would have been impossible.

You are not alone. I was in this exact same position at MSFT and I put in my resignation. I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do and I frequently felt I was in one of those Bullshit jobs (courtesy of David Graeber). I was paid handsomely but once the sign on stock ran out, I saw that I was staying in the job just for security. I felt like one of those Hooli engineers who were sunbathing at the Hooli office terrace waiting for their stocks to vest. I am only 9 years into my career and I didn’t see that as the optimal thing for my career rn.

I didn’t have any major financial obligations like you though, so it was a much simpler decision for me.

Hang in there buddy and also thanks for the deeply human comment.

Here’s my take as an Indian having lived in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru

1. No manufacturing expertise in India, we aren’t a manufacturing powerhouse despite having similar levels of population as China. We have always prioritised services. That has an inherent limit.

2. Local governments here are powerless. I don’t have the source for this but only about 3% of public spending is done by local governments at the municipal level. Even for “rich” cities, local governments although are wealthy they are always controlled by whoever has power at the state level. It’s why Indian cities have such decrepit infrastructure vis a vis China.

3. Caste based politics and more recently freebies based politics. Recently, state governments all over India have been all out bribing voters with cash transfers if voted to power. This won’t bode well for long term financial stability. This is also short term thinking at its finest. They have run out of ideas.

4. Weak rule of law. There’s a huge backlog of cases in our justice system right from Supreme Court to the local courts. Doing business in India can backfire in spectacular ways (inordinate tax demands by union government etc).

Entire studies can be done but these are top 4 things keeping India where it is.

Is this course still available? What about the course materials? I know it will be dated but if so can someone pls share the links. Tried searching for it on google but couldn’t find it.

It’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating.

In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.

So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.

This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.

There’s a hierarchy amongst knowledge work and AI hasn’t yet been able to do the work that is rare and valuable.

Over the past two decades, there have been lot of solved problems like building boring scalable web apps, UX design etc and AI is fairly good at this, enough so that good prompting can get you very far. This shouldn’t be a surprise, there’s a lot of publicly available data for this (GitHub repos etc).

On the other hand, there are rarer Computer science problems like designing efficient Datacenters, GPUs, DL models. Think about problems that someone of Jeff Dean’s or James Hamilton’s (AWS SVP) or a skilled Computer Architecture researcher like David Paterson’s ability would solve. These are incredibly hard and rare problems and AI hasn’t been able to make much progress in these areas. That’s true for other sciences as well.

If you’re a regular Joe like me who builds boring CRUD apps, AI is coming for you.

What I mean is if you are working on incredibly hard and rare problems that require rare skills and also those problems don’t have publicly available data that LLMs can be trained on, you’re safe from being “automated” away. If not, you must plan accordingly. Also if you’re a skilled manager (in any field) AI cannot replace you, highly skilled managers that can get the best out of their teams have rare skills that aren’t easily replicable even amongst humans much less AI. Although, if going forward we need fewer developers we will need fewer managers too.

> because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about

> time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.

I work at MSFT and at-least in my org, this is happening at warp speed. Every document I read, my first thoughts are what is the kernel of the idea that the writer was trying to convey ? Because 95% of the content of the doc is just verbiage. You can always tell its verbiage, the em-dashes, the rhythmic text, the green check mark emoji etc. We are hoping that volume of output will make up for the quality or lack thereof. More markdown files, more AGENTS.md file but is that making us better developers ? It certainly is giving the illusion that we are faster but I don't know how management thinks this will lead to tangible impact on the top line or bottom line.

In my experience, some of the best writing (in design docs and PM specs) at MSFT have been human written. You can see the clarity of purpose from the writer, ithere is no need to read it again, it is equivalent to having a 1-on-1 with the writer themselves. But AI written slop, the less said the better.

This piece hits home, I wonder how the experience is at other Big Tech companies.

I work at MSFT. I can understand the incentives behind this change. Although I am not sure how different GitHub culture is from MSFT.

I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs so that everyone down from Nadella to the dev and PM for this can use it to hype up GH Copilot. It’s also a simple and clean metric that goes well in your Connects (performance discussion), you could say the feature I worked on led to xx million copilot authored PRs and there is now an AI usage mandate and you need to mention how you used AI to do something more efficiently blah blah. It’s good old promotion theatre. I don’t think its unique to MSFT though and is probably common across Big Tech.

the Microsofties viewing their IBM colleagues as mired in pointless bureaucracy and the IBM folks viewing Microsofties as undisciplined hackers.

I work at MSFT, this made me chuckle hard. Microsoft must have been a very different company back then, because now I find myself and my colleagues mired in pointless bureaucracy via endless meetings, AI mandates, promotion theatre and the list goes on. I am decently paid but the bureaucracy is soul destroying.

I work at MSFT and can concur. It’s dystopian that this is industry wide. It’s just stat padding tbh, things that people can bring up during their performance discussions, oh hey I ran this AI initiative, wrote a bunch of markdown files, that had..what impact exactly ? Never mind.

Don’t even get me started on the meaningless meetings that make The Office seem like a serious drama.

Random reward mechanisms have been woven into the very fabric of the digital world, so doesn’t surprise me.

If you have the self-awareness to realise that your job is BS and is deleterious to your well being the path of least resistance is to simply quit and find another job hopefully that is more relevant to what you’re skilled at.

All this chicanery to escape work would only eat at my conscience. I don’t believe for one moment that I should be emotionally attached to my employer but at the same time I am a professional and am paid to do a job. I should hold up my end of the bargain. Being deceitful 24X7, 365 days a year will eventually wear me out because there’s always the chance I will be found out. There’s also the reputational risk of being found BS’ing which is non-trivial and could ruin chances of future employment.

The path of least resistance is simply to quit.