A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.
I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.
You are tired, but you still read, still commented (or worse, commented but didn’t read).
I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
the fact that he posted in his personal blog doesn't change the fact that for many of us this is corporate BS and should not be in the top of HN first page. If you disagree, upvote comments you like, don't try to be a moderator.
> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.