Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features