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Chris Read
cread
Dev, Ops, and everything in between.
Occasional speaker, Bare Metal DevOps Advocate.
From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck:
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.
That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary.
Rationale: Measure the performance of a single threaded streaming write of a reasonably large file. The aim is to measure how well the file system and platform can sustain a write workload, which will depend on how well it can group and dispatch writes. It's difficult to benchmark buffered file system writes in both a short duration and in a repeatable way, as performance greatly depends on if and when the pagecache begins to flush dirty data. As a workaround, an fsync() at the end of the benchmark is called to ensure that flushing will always occur, and the benchmark also repeats four times. While this provides a much more reliable measurement, it is somewhat worst-case (applications don't always fsync), providing closer to a minimum rate – rather than a maximum rate – that you should expect.
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real