I rarely talk about work because almost everything I do is NDA, trade secret, classified, or otherwise controlled information – so it’s easier to just avoid the topic entirely.
But, I’ve also been doing what I do for a really long time – and there are companies I’ve done things for that have literally ceased to exist over the last few decades, so I figure I can talk about some general things now.
Ages ago, in the mid-90’s, I ran administration on SPARC-based Solaris 2 systems for Intelligent Electronics / Ingram Micro. This was in addition to more mundane things like X86 Novell systems and more obtuse things like IBM AS/400 systems, so I had some deep exposure to high-end (for the time) business systems.
And this eventually led to working with Sun Microsystems for a while… I was involved in testing for the SWUP (Software Update Platform) portion of Solaris 10 – back when Solaris 10 became a thing in January of 2005.
Solaris 10 was both interesting and rather cursed from the get-go; Sun was really proud of Solaris because they made it and it ran really well on their own SPARC hardware, so it was their baby – but they were also getting heavily beat up by commodity X86 systems running Linux…
So, to maintain relevance, they went open source. And with that Solaris 10 was created.
The problem was Sun, as a company, was mired in their extravagant past and wasn’t lean or nimble enough for the post-tech bubble world they found themselves in.
I worked at the Broomfield campus during my time there in 2005, and even then several of the buildings were vacant. But in the engineering building the extravagance was still in effect; there were employee kitchens everywhere, lots of free food, and everyone worked in ‘cubes’ that were about 15 feet square with floor to ceiling walls – one of which was all glass and had a sliding door. The more prima-donna personalities were allowed to outfit their office however they wanted, so a few were pretty eclectic.
But organizationally the place had problems… Engineering was a cost center model, so it was countless small teams fighting for their very existence against other small teams, everyone ‘worked from home’ several days a week and relied on internal communications tools that were sketchy at best to maintain project timelines, and the project I was on wasn’t even sure who was in charge until about two weeks before the project’s end…
And all of the project documentation was basic at best because in those days at Sun, if it was hard to create it should be hard to understand! And if there was documentation, it was squirreled away on partitions you probably didn’t have access to for a week or two after you discovered it…
Then there were the more mechanical aspects that were problematic, like the weeks it took to provision test hardware and get credentials for them – even though the servers were on the other side of the wall from my office.
It wasn’t all bad though. I really enjoyed the remote desktop systems they had where any machine, anywhere, could be used as “your” machine with all of “your” stuff just by sticking your badge in the reader. I applied a lot of this to the systems I run at work, which worked amazingly well when the mysterious virus of unknown origin made the entire company ‘work from home’ for the last few years.
All in all, my time at Sun Microsystems was an interesting view into how ‘Silicon Valley Big Tech’ operates, and kinda dissuaded me from accepting the various headhunter interviews over the years.
Sure, I make less than industry average for someone with my experience and resume – but I also don’t have to deal with a lot of the B.S. that plagues my position. So it works for me. 🙂
Listening to "Tech Noir" by Gunship