> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show that "remoteness works".
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin piece every day.
If only I had known that in the past, I even once received the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
While I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations [for a “company-wide strategy to win back the cloud”], which Intel can continue to do in my absence.
The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed plan for world domination while you’re off doing something else seems a bit… unrealistic, to say the least.
You’re dead on. This kind of knee-deep gluey “advice” is the cult of personality that intel now thinks is effective planning. The head’s-down hard work of the 80’s and 90’s vanished when the media turned Grove into a reluctant folk hero and the bubble burst. I was there for 21 years, this guy is symptom of a much larger problem that is self-sustaining. Too many people trying to hide, do the bare minimum, and collect a fat paycheck, while people like this wave around grand plans that will never be touched. Yep I’m a cynic, two decades there fried my compassion circuits.
He doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
Brendan Gregg deserves respect. Intel? Their reputation had been in the gutter for a few years now. The classic way to offend a nerd is to have a leading market position, tons of cash and resources, then squander it on politics and bullshit.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
Readit News
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
(I’m not the author of this)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
You were delegated a manager's job?
>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.
Deleted Comment
I can't even say that they are wrong.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
Wouldn't hurt to try!
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.
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.
Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.
Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.
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".
And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed plan for world domination while you’re off doing something else seems a bit… unrealistic, to say the least.
Seems a bit arrogant and short sighted. He would be the only one that cares about this in the end.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
Dead Comment