> A bunch of people got promoted. We all breathed a sigh of relief. The 90 work weeks stopped for a few weeks.
When you move up, you move on; issues from then on are the next guy's problem. Exec dynamics are often "gather successes to me and push off failures to others" - sounds like some exec won.
> This would scare me too.
For what it's worth a few (10ish) years ago we did this with the J9 compiler at IBM (technically just the backed that was shared between Java, C++, etc). Same idea with simulated annealing. It did end up finding some really strange bugs, but they were bugs that were present regardless, we just hadn't found the right test case for it. We did end up getting some performance out of it, but not nearly as much as you'd expect. It mostly boiled down to running a few extra constant folding passes.
There's some upsides to that, but basically even though you're a W-2 employee, you're effectively a consultant in that arrangement. Your job is not secure.
This is a damn cool use of simulated annealing.
> This would scare me too.
FWIW, I made it clear that this was also a great way to break the app :)
> So said brilliant engineer in Amsterdam, built an annealing algorithm in the release build to reorder the optimization passes in such a way to as minimize size. This shaved a whooping 11 mbs off the total machine code size and bought us enough runway to keep development going.
> This terrified the Swift compiler engineers, they were worried that untested complier pass orders would expose untested bugs
This would scare me too.
> I had privately had the “we need to stop” conversation with my director. He told me that if this project fails he might as well pack his bags. The same was true for his boss all the way up to the VP. There was no way out.
This brings up an interesting point. The author attributes some decisions in the thread to the "sunk cost fallacy". The business costs were sunk, but if the employees and management are too afraid for their job to make the "cut your losses" decision, the costs are not really sunk, at least not in the minds of the right people.