Re: [TUHS] CMU Mach sources?

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 11:11:43AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Larry, there are many, many
> engineers who works because they get a paycheck, and so they go home
> at 5pm.  Some people might be free to improve their code on their own
> time, or late at night, but corporation also preach "work/life
> balance" --- and then don't fund time for making code long-term
> maintainable or reducing tech debt.

Yeah, I was talking about 25-30 years ago.  And even then there were
people who were there for the paycheck.  But the people I considered
my peers were people who cared deeply about doing work well.  The
motivation was that we were at Sun, everyone wanted a Sun workstation,
which made it all the more important that we did stuff right.

If you need any proof, look no further than me.  I was the guy who was
so happy to be at Sun, I walked around for 3 years saying "I'd do this
job for free if I had enough money" :)

I think that feeling still exists but it is much harder to find these
days, systems work seems to have dried up, kids think a server is a
VM, it's a strange world.

> There is a similar related issue around publishing papers to document
> great ideas.  This takes time away from product development, and it
> used to be that Sun was really prolific at documenting their technical
> innovations at conferences like Usenix.  Over time, the academic
> traditions started dying off, and managers who came from that
> tradition moved on, retired, or got promoted beyond the point where
> they could encourage engineers to do that work.  And it wasn't just at
> Sun; I was working at IBM when IBM decided to take away the (de
> minimus) bonus for publishing papers at conferences.  

Huh, I didn't know IBM gave bonuses for papers, Sun never did.  I don't
remember, but they may have paid for us to go to a conference.

> But at the
> Usenix board, I remember looking at a chart of the declining number of
> ATC papers coming from industry over time.   And it was very depressing...

Tell me about it.  Systems work just isn't what it once was.