Juan-Carlos Gandhi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
juan_gandhi) wrote2014-06-30 11:04 pm
juan_gandhi) wrote2014-06-30 11:04 pm
Entry tags:
RIP orkut.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7965110
I was in that team from about 2006 to 2008. We grew the subscriber base, reaching about 40M, beating FB those days, but FB was catching up. Seems like FB was doing everything right, and we did what Larry told us - "improve latency".
The team was split into three, UI in India, c backend in Brazil, middle tier in MV. Indian guys were excellent, I'm still friends with some of them on FB and LinkedIn. Brazilian guys were the brightest; their code was beautiful, covered with unittests, compact, no-nonsense, did what was required. But the MV team was in disarray.
See, in MV, in these side-kick teams, what you do did not count. Whom you know is what counts. So if you are a friend with Larry (I'll skip other names), you are automatically a genius; if you did not even go to Stanford, you are assumed to be a low-life idiot. "Category Theory?!" - exclaimed once my manager. She did not hear the expression before, but it sounded so amusing to her that some idiot foreigner is not ashamed to talk such obvious nonsense.
We did have a bunch of very smart and very decent people - but they knew their place. I never did, having no clue what my place is. Outside of the team I had my 20% project, participated in Guava; inside the team I was a nobody.
In particular, talking to PMs was almost useless. They knew better. I went there specifically because I love social networks, and, having some experience with Fido and Livejournal... but well, who cares. Those pms, as well as the rest of MV team, were clueless about social networks; Google people are not much social anyway, as you all probably know. orkut.com was popular in Brazil and India, and there people knew what to do with it, and what others needed; but in MV people only listened to the management.
And the management could call them "horsepower". No shit, you sit in the meeting, and they call you "horsepower".
And there was a manager once, Ann-Mei Chang. Crazy like in the movies. Like Lydia in Breaking Bad. She had a 1-on-1 with everybody once a week; she would ask you what are current problems, and the next week would dump them on you as if they were all your deficiencies. Now she's somewhere in the government.
Testing - forget it, "our code is too complicated to be tested". When I introduced tests, with some ad-hoc mocking, I was told, oh now, that's not fair. Josh Kerievsky said everything is fair in testing, but did the even hear the name? What they heard was that Larry said "latency".
Convincing them that "friending" is not symmetrical relationship took me a month. And of course if you so insist, you have to change the innards of the backend, since everything assumed that if I friend you, you consider me your friend (and share all friend-only stuff with me).
Still, it was really fun. 40M people out there, more than pixels on the screen - it's a continuum. You introduce a feature, thousands of people love you, thousands hate you. It was fun.
But of course, feature. You introduce a feature, have it running, have all the tests. And a week later your feature stops working, and the managers asks why, and you look it up, and you see that your tests were commented out, because they were interfering with someone else's "urgent" feature.
Somehow they managed to get Brad Fitzpatrick, and then what? He had silently slipped out of all this, probably having had more experience with assholes than us stupid enthusiasts.
We had a project lead or something. We also had morning standups. So the lead once came over to our standup, impatiently waited until it was his turn, pointed his finger to the red/green/blue light that showed the build status, and said: "all I want is that this light were always green". (We can do that. Like before, when there were no unittests.)
But again, there was a lot of fun; if you are a team member, you are a celeb in the network; dozens of beautiful Brazilian girls every morning wrote to you, wishing you bom dia, and by the end of the day they wished you boa noite... that's where I picked up some of this beautiful (okay, just the best I know) language, Brazilian Portuguese.
Okay, and some "hackers" would call you a homosexual on the network, not sure why it would be an insult, probably it is for them. Like some people in this country think that calling someone a Russian or a Chinese is an insult. Nice try.
Well, it's life. As a result, I got some friends.
I was in that team from about 2006 to 2008. We grew the subscriber base, reaching about 40M, beating FB those days, but FB was catching up. Seems like FB was doing everything right, and we did what Larry told us - "improve latency".
The team was split into three, UI in India, c backend in Brazil, middle tier in MV. Indian guys were excellent, I'm still friends with some of them on FB and LinkedIn. Brazilian guys were the brightest; their code was beautiful, covered with unittests, compact, no-nonsense, did what was required. But the MV team was in disarray.
See, in MV, in these side-kick teams, what you do did not count. Whom you know is what counts. So if you are a friend with Larry (I'll skip other names), you are automatically a genius; if you did not even go to Stanford, you are assumed to be a low-life idiot. "Category Theory?!" - exclaimed once my manager. She did not hear the expression before, but it sounded so amusing to her that some idiot foreigner is not ashamed to talk such obvious nonsense.
We did have a bunch of very smart and very decent people - but they knew their place. I never did, having no clue what my place is. Outside of the team I had my 20% project, participated in Guava; inside the team I was a nobody.
In particular, talking to PMs was almost useless. They knew better. I went there specifically because I love social networks, and, having some experience with Fido and Livejournal... but well, who cares. Those pms, as well as the rest of MV team, were clueless about social networks; Google people are not much social anyway, as you all probably know. orkut.com was popular in Brazil and India, and there people knew what to do with it, and what others needed; but in MV people only listened to the management.
And the management could call them "horsepower". No shit, you sit in the meeting, and they call you "horsepower".
And there was a manager once, Ann-Mei Chang. Crazy like in the movies. Like Lydia in Breaking Bad. She had a 1-on-1 with everybody once a week; she would ask you what are current problems, and the next week would dump them on you as if they were all your deficiencies. Now she's somewhere in the government.
Testing - forget it, "our code is too complicated to be tested". When I introduced tests, with some ad-hoc mocking, I was told, oh now, that's not fair. Josh Kerievsky said everything is fair in testing, but did the even hear the name? What they heard was that Larry said "latency".
Convincing them that "friending" is not symmetrical relationship took me a month. And of course if you so insist, you have to change the innards of the backend, since everything assumed that if I friend you, you consider me your friend (and share all friend-only stuff with me).
Still, it was really fun. 40M people out there, more than pixels on the screen - it's a continuum. You introduce a feature, thousands of people love you, thousands hate you. It was fun.
But of course, feature. You introduce a feature, have it running, have all the tests. And a week later your feature stops working, and the managers asks why, and you look it up, and you see that your tests were commented out, because they were interfering with someone else's "urgent" feature.
Somehow they managed to get Brad Fitzpatrick, and then what? He had silently slipped out of all this, probably having had more experience with assholes than us stupid enthusiasts.
We had a project lead or something. We also had morning standups. So the lead once came over to our standup, impatiently waited until it was his turn, pointed his finger to the red/green/blue light that showed the build status, and said: "all I want is that this light were always green". (We can do that. Like before, when there were no unittests.)
But again, there was a lot of fun; if you are a team member, you are a celeb in the network; dozens of beautiful Brazilian girls every morning wrote to you, wishing you bom dia, and by the end of the day they wished you boa noite... that's where I picked up some of this beautiful (okay, just the best I know) language, Brazilian Portuguese.
Okay, and some "hackers" would call you a homosexual on the network, not sure why it would be an insult, probably it is for them. Like some people in this country think that calling someone a Russian or a Chinese is an insult. Nice try.
Well, it's life. As a result, I got some friends.
no subject
А насчет "foreigner idiot" - меня за 15 лет в США никто ни разу не попрекнул ни акцентом, ни происхождением. По крайней мере так, чтобы я обиделся и это запомнилось. Может, это разница западного и восточного берега.
no subject
Но это специфика конторы, мне кажется; нигде больше я такого не видел.
no subject
at least, that
other stuff just depends on team
but, honestly, what you depict doesn't differ very much from, say, very average project among industry (I've seen quite a lot of 'em over different countries)
here, they just very relaxed - we'd must have been fucked hard for being THAT laid back when was working in Ukrainian outsourcers
no subject
no subject
у меня бывало и ни раз
или пипл попремее вокруг
оба берега
no subject