The new developers managed to convince the leadership that we needed "better" processes, and other technologies. The result of this was rewiting the system into more micro services than developers in different languages and multiple frameworks. The new processes ensured that teams didn't talk together because each team should be independent. The startup failed hard and barely survived even after major cuts
Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.
“Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting.
Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.
I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.
In 95%+ cases that’s a pretty terrible idea
Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.
We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.
2. Terraform isn't a Google product. It's by Hashicorp
Also, do you really need it when you're a startup running 3 EC2 clusters with "potentially tons of customers"? No.
When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on.
So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”
I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.
So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.