throwabayhay

They mention macOS as "one platform with consistent APIs and behavior". But macOS (or NeXTStep, as it started out as), an actual UNIX system (certified!), chose not to use X11 to achieve that, but to entirely roll their own.

We're moving in circles, but again, I don't believe a company can bring out good products for very long if my experience is the exception. And as so often the case, the "half dozen" other people might be venting for their experience.

If there is no somewhat healthy reward culture, the multiple passionate people in the many different levels needed would leave.

And in my experience, FAANG are not bad at it, so my point is: These generalizations don't work.

I even stated that I don't doubt this may have been true for you. But if every large company were really so bad in general as is portrayed here, the people who make good stuff, and who need to work with each other a great deal to achieve that, would leave.

I said: "I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did."

And I did see other peers who did not play any games that I could see be promoted for merit.

So maybe generalizations over large companies just don't work well.

I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.

I did sometimes, though it still benefitted something in the end. After all, my boss and other people further up the chain have a say in whether I get promoted as well, not just my peers.

I don't understand this question, can you elaborate?

Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level?

EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.

> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

I bet there is a lot of jobs where you don't feel (and probably don't do) anything valuable with your time, but that is not necessarily tied to large organizations. There are a lot of engineers who make computers, cars, civil infrastructure components, smartphones, computers, game consoles, test equipment, appliances, power plants, industrial processes... at large organizations that feel that they are doing something valuable, and something that they could not do in this manner at a smaller company.

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.

I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.

That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because "humans", but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong.

Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you're staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don't complain about, that just works, and so you don't consciously think about it very much.

This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact.

Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.

Not true, and just more complex in general.

EDIT: I just looked at some of your other comments. I think you mean well and have some impressive knowledge for someone not working on those things, but some of it is also guesswork about very complex details that even internal people can get wrong, so I think publicly claiming conjecture as if it were fact is more misleading than you mean it to be.

If you want more details: Lots of parts are obviously pure C, but in my experience the C++ stuff is usually quite incremental as well. Changing a header included in lots of places is the obvious multiplier to build time.

Linking does take some time, but it’s only really noticeable if you do very incremental changes (e.g. change a single value, build, boot, repeat).

Overall, building a whole kernel from scratch even for multiple configurations is not unbearable during normal development.

Nah. What you say is partly true, but I and others build xnu locally and incrementally all the time. Fast enough.