I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.”

How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

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bcantrill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest, rabbi, lawyer, spouse, etc.) -- and anyone who knows me would know that I'm not the person to be confessing these kinds of sins to anyway.

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orochimaaru 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you have a field engineering org that can move these players off of VMWare into Oxide (the software and monitoring, etc.), you could be looking at easy picking of VMWare customers.

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eduction an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer?

Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?

I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.

	▲	bcantrill 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers, full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of their customers. (I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.) Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer. Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?

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neilv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a tricky one for public writing discretion. The Sun and Broadcom connections add to the point. Something a person with that background said was surprising. And the exact wording in one of the quotes was relevant.

I don't know whether I would've identified the person. As a principal-ish engineer and early startup person, who interacts with teams and all up and down the org charts of companies, it's important that people trust me. One part of that is to show discretion when entrusted with information. It's nuanced.

I have some WTF quotes and situations from recent interviews that I've decided not to share. The most recent one I did share was relatively mild, and I decided to paraphrase what the out-of-line person said, and be reasonably confident the person couldn't be identified. The incubator mentioned is harder to obscure, and is relevant to some people, so I tried to find a reasonable balance, but they should know who they are and be able to take some criticism, so I didn't worry much about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415495

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thundergolfer 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I dunno, a few hundred folks?

	▲	margalabargala 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would be shocked if the number of former Sun people who then worked at VMware and now are in senior engineering management at Broadcom was as high as five.