that’s whacked

recruiting the next generation

Thursday, Nov 4. 2004  –  Category: Musings

haven’t posted much lately, been too busy at work trying to get ready for recruiting and finishing the NUMA project work i’ve been on. we’re trying to get our code into these last few builds of Solaris 10, and, well, it’s risky. it’s tough because Solaris has built its reputation on reliability and stability. when a project like ours, which is a performance project which optimises many of the memory routines, it can be risky to have it go in so late in the game. you have to balance your desire for better performance/speed versus the need for stability. if a project goes in early in the software development life of a project, it has more “soak time” where you have more time to find bugs, and to fix bugs exposed by daily testing. going in late means less “soak time”, and higher risk.

on a lighter note, we went snowboarding for the first time this season. it was a blast…we went to Kirkwood, and Wendy reaffirmed she can turn. we played around on the beginner slopes all day for 5 runs, and then i did my one black diamond run before we headed back home.

i’m now in San Diego with Eric, one of the developers i’ve had the good fortune to have worked with many times over the past year since i’ve joined Sun. we’re recruiting at UCSD for kernel developers and kernel test developers, and it’s been a lot of fun. Wednesday night we had an info session where we both talked about Sun, the Solaris group, the Solaris kernel group in particular, and why we love our jobs. we had about 20 students come (who still managed to eat all the pizza we ordered (enough for 50, according to UCSD catering!), and i hope we were able to win some of them to the cause.

today we had a big “Sun Day” with Central Engineering, the EE/MAE guys down here in San Diego. i gave a small 30 minute talk on why people should want to work at Sun after college, and then Eric gave a really good in-depth technical talk on Solaris 10, it’s new features, and the open sourcing efforts. we talked with students throughout the day, and Eric gave some really cool DTrace demos. when we had a lull, he also showed me some cool stuff w/ zones/containers.

tommorrow is our big (and last) interview day where we get to turn the tables. for the past two days we’ve been selling selling selling Sun, trying to convince everyone at UCSD why Sun rocks. now we get to change places and have the students try and convince us why THEY rock. this should be an interesting experience. it’ll be nice to be sitting on the other side of the recruiting table for once…