I've worked at a (giant well known) company/bank in New York that basically mandated that people switch jobs internally every 18 to 24 months. It was part of the expectations. I was there for 4 years. I had 3 different roles in 3 different teams.
It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other people will inherit your work / decisions. And always learning new things / keeping best practices in mind.
It's something I've kept in mind everywhere I've been.
Is there a trade off between depth and breadth here? While not the SV tech scene, I remember working for an aerospace company that had some people in the same positions for a couple decades. For the administrative positions it seemed to breed complacency, but for the technical positions it seemed to provide a very deep level of technical expertise that would be difficult to cultivate within a couple years
the other side from my experience at a previous engineering job is that it can also breed deep defensive layers around bad engineering work.
the same 3 core people stayed on the project for 11 years from the begging and hired and fired around weither you're a threat to their position. managers would come and go, they were helpless and held no real power in the project, until they settled for a puppet manager who would defer every decision up to them and act as a secretary.
the result was a huge pile of tech debt that only they could touch and they kept getting raises because the project couldn't afford to lose them, until the project died of it own weight.
same, i joined a place where it turned out a small group of people basically held all the power and had created a byzantine system only they could reason about. management was also trapped because the devs who knew the system held all the power.
This is smart. I left GS right around the time they were starting such an (similar?) initiative. It also makes employees more fungible, on average, which is nice.
I don't know of any such mandate in GS, was it for a specific division or group of teams? The company culture supports moving internally, but I never heard of anything like a mandate in my very recent stint there.
Circa 2014 they started a program where Analysts temporarily work on teams that did not hire them, following their three-month orientation. Based on the parent comment, it sounds as if it was taken even further. I was in the Tech Division before it was rebranded as Engineering and merged with SecDiv / Core Strats by Eli Wiesel et al.
We used to run a very well run Kubernetes clusters with a single devops, then two. If you have senior devops engineers who know what they are doing and have the opportunity to greenfield it's really not that bad. We now have 4 devops engineers.
At the end of the day it's not necessarily Kubernetes that's difficult/time consuming, it's all the context around it.
How do you monitor/observability? Security? What's your CI/CD to deploy everything? How do you fully automate everything in reproducible ways within the k8s clusters, and outside?
I've been doing infrastructure management / devops for well over 23 years. Built & managed datacenters running tens of thousands of servers.
Kubernetes and AWS have made my life easier. What's really important is having the right senior people fully aware of the latest practices to get started. Greenfield now is easier than ever.
I absolutely despise open office plans. I can't work in them.
My productivity shot an incredible amount as soon as I had no choice than to work from home in March, and everybody else in the office. Saved 2 hours a day. And I can use my own bathroom... that alone is worth it.
I don't understand this. Why? Why couldn't you go for a 30 minutes bike ride every morning as if you were going to work? and go back home? What's the difference?
I think purpose. It's easy to take it as a perk that you can ride your bike for 30 min and get "free" exercise while you go to work. It's a bit different mindset to ride your bike just for the sake of exercising and not having a bigger goal behind it.
It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other people will inherit your work / decisions. And always learning new things / keeping best practices in mind.
It's something I've kept in mind everywhere I've been.