It’s been a crazy few weeks. I’ve heard the phrase “drinking from the fire hose” many times, and while I’ve never actually tried to do that, I suspect the experience is something like this. I’m having a blast though. A few quick first impressions:
- First things first: The lead up to the announcement was remarkable—not at all what I expected from a big company. As Jim Grisanzio pointed out, the PR people did a great job coordinating everything, but the bloggers were very much in the lead here. In fact, I was given so little (OK, no) guidance on what “the message” was supposed to be that I sent a draft of what I was going to post to Jonathan, and he replied, no one is allowed to run their posts by me, just speak your mind, that’s what we all do. The message: Sun really is as transparent as it appears from the outside perspective.
- In the other direction, the people here are not only open to the outside perspective, they want to hear it. That’s a big part of the reason I’m here now. Solaris has lost a lot of developer mindshare to Linux over the past 5-10 years. There are important lessons to be learned from that, and we (yes, I feel like it’s “we” already) are intent on doing just that.
- Maybe it’s just the people I’m working with, but this place feels like a startup. There’s a lot of positive energy, a real sense of urgency, and people genuinely seem to love what they’re doing. The difference: It’s a startup with actual resources. You know, like 30,000+ people. A potent combination indeed.
Regular blogging should resume shortly.
I certainly felt that way at IBM, in the LTC.
I started at Sun (with far less fanfare, understandably!) about the same time you did, and my new boss/old friend there used the same “drinking from a firehose” metaphor to describe my first visit to the Broomfield campus (I’ll be working mostly from my home in Italy).
I, too, am delighted with Sun culture as I find it so far – there seem to be a lot of very happy people there who know what they’re doing, but are open to new perspectives as well. It’s a fascinating new “country” to explore.
Glad to see you are enjoying yourself. I can’t speak for all Fortune 500 companies, but my first year (about 6 years ago) at Intel was very similar. I was greatly impressed at the time how fast the 800 lb. gorilla could move.
One word of caution, a company that moves fast has it’s benefits and disadvantages for its employees. The main disadvantage for its employees is that people can easily get left behind when the company moves into a new direction or wishes to leave a certain market. During my 5 years at Intel, I saw several reorgs and changes in direction as Intel reinvented itself. While I believe Intel was better off as a result of these changes, not everybody at Intel benefited from these changes as business units were eliminated, sold-off or absorbed into other business units. Intel did a decent job of trying to relocate people to on-going business concerns, but if you lacked the skill set for the new business unit there was little they could do.
For a company that moves slowly, employees can usually see these changes coming and find other opportunities in the same company or another company. However, a company that moves quickly is much more likely to catch its employees unprepared for the change.
If they are really interested in hearing an outside perspective, I have one to offer: GPL ZFS.
Now, if they decide that’s not in their best interest, that’s fine, but if they would like developer mindshare (read: free debugging) on what could be a new standard, they need to get it into more open source OSs, and *BSDs are not going to be enough…
Is there any chance of seeing a “Solaris Testdrive” anytime soon (something similar to http://www.testdrive.hp.com). I think this could really help getting more developers interested in Solaris (as it’s not always easy to get access to a Solaris box).
Recently installed solaris nevada 55. It seems like a great operating system. But….no via sata driver. After years of this chip being in the market. No network driver, so no internet connection. I know there is a third party driver for this network card(yukon sysconnect), but this driver is in every linux kernel.
Hello
I’m interested in applying for a job at a local Fortune 500 company. What specifically is the advantage of working for one? Any particular disadvantages?