dmuino
Inktomi (YST) was acquired in 2003, later Overture (YSM) and both were linux shops. YST was the biggest property by far and we didn't have any kernel developers. We were doing just fine with stock debian, then stock RHEL. (I did a few very minor patches for 32-bit, like splitting user-space/kernel to 3.5/0.5G instead of 3/1G, and some caching improvements for /proc, but I wasn't a kernel developer). Linux just worked. Drivers were available and supported for the HW we needed. Oprofile, systemtap worked fine for the most part. We later hired one kernel developer to help Mail move to linux, but we always had more freebsd kernel developers.
For freebsd you needed to write the drivers and the tools. That took time and money. The community was also smaller and it was harder to hire people with experience. Acquisitions were running on linux too.
The decision was not easy. Y! already had great freebsd engineers. By announcing that linux would be the supported platform going forward it was a given that many of them wouldn't be happy and leave. Fortunately not all of them left. For example Peter W. still works there.
In any case I don't think there was really an alternative.
Note that Yahoo! was employing a few very bright freebsd kernel engineers but when the decision was announced that linux was the future many of them decided to leave. That made the path forward even clearer. It wasn't just a matter of integrating new acquisitions easier, and the fact that it was easier to hire people with linux experience than with freebsd experience. That was around 2008 IIRC. I left in 2010, and Rick less than a year later.
I've been a happy Netflix employee for over 4 years and have never experienced a 'large layoff' event. All the layoffs I've witnessed were not a surprise for the people affected.
Senior engineers usually make more money than their direct managers, but I fail to see how that's an issue.
I'm guessing RayVR met with Patty who left Netflix 2 years ago. My interview with her was different but I guess it would depend on your background and what she was trying to determine. In my case it was mostly to see if I was going to be a good cultural fit since I was at the time working for Yahoo which had a completely different culture. To me that was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Actually the whole interview process was great, and it was one of the major reasons I chose Netflix over other companies.
It's not a definitive treatise on psychopathy, just the adventures of the author as he dives into this fascinating world. Definitely worth getting it at this price.
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0xffeaa0cc: 0x080485e4 0x08048640 0x0804869c 0x08048719 (gdb) x run
0x804875b <run>: 0x83e58955 (gdb) gdb) x/40x (void*)fns-0x40
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- Operations are not automatically aborted if the client closes the connection. Suppose a case where the client is sending many queries that are queued by the server (usually waiting for a lock to be released). Client times out, re-establishes a connection, retries, etc. Mongo will execute the operations even if the client is no longer waiting for the response. Operations are not automatically aborted.
- Sending slaveOk() queries need to be sent to the slaves explicitly by the driver, and I haven't seen it work reliably. Ideally you'd send them to mongos and let it send slaveOk() queries automatically to the slaves. All the drivers would be simpler and just work. But this is not the case. You can't do it unless sharding is enabled. Each driver needs to implement this functionality.
But I must say that overall my experience has been very positive. It's very developer friendly. You can go from not knowing anything about it to having a working prototype in an hour or so. The flexibility in querying the system is awesome.
You just need to understand the limitations of the system. Once you start pushing the limits it gets significantly more complicated.