Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/04/14/intel-openstack-project-rackspace/ <comment><USER4> OpenStack really has a bunch of problems.

The big one is that OpenStack is about building and operating your own Rackspace; this is not something IT organizations can even hire for let alone carry off. The idea that they could/would/should was purely aspirational.

The others are that it's basically a mess - no two OS deployments will look the same - and that it has neither an operational advantage nor too much of a pricing advantage (50% for RHAT) over VMware - which is better integrated and much, much better from a admin experience and debuggability standpoint.

I looked hard at leveraging OpenStack for the service we were building but the underlying code was often cringetastic and somewhat naive. At some level if you run software as a service you can work around poor code quality - something friends from AWS have emphasized - but you can't throw it over the wall and have other people without large engineering staffs there to help run it - which doesn't work in the small. VMware is the opposite approach - <USER2> entire model and practices evolved out of arm's reach software sales and support. So naturally it works better.

<comment><USER5> As a small competitor to Racksapce in 2010, designing a replacement for our (then) 8-year old VM structure, Bytemark bet against Openstack from the 1st announcement and spent years building something the-same-but-different.

It wasn't _just_ that Openstack was unreleased and talking about foundations and making grand promises without any production-grade code. It was just that we could never work out which version Rackspace was actually running for their actual customers, and the details of how to actually _deploy_ it and make it work seemed enormously fiddly compared to VMWare, which was where they were taking aim. I expected them to say "now running on Openstack, 100%!"

Also the design seemed to mirror AWS, as if the only answer to their dominance was to ... copy every facility they were producing exactly?

We had a more definite vision of where VMs should go, and thought it was a bad plan to aim at "Amazon, but smaller!". In particular we really really wanted live migrations to be a part of our platform - where we really really cared about uptime of individual VMs, and wanted people to be able to upgrade them on the fly. Plus, y'know, for a hosting company, being in control of, and having opinions of our hosting platform was what people paid us for!

So we designed our in-house platform BigV instead (now Bytemark Cloud Servers) -> [https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2012/12/Desig...](https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2012/12/DesignAndImplementationOfBigV.pdf) [pdf] And even though we (re)invented an NBD server to make all the live migration stuff work [https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c](https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c) I believe we've ended up with something that does a small number of things far better.

I see people asking whether Openstack is actually running anywhere very public, and have read some pained war stories. So it still feels like the right decision, even before this announcement. Plus it seems like live migration in Openstack is still an exotic and difficult option, whereas that's been our standard practice for years.

There are plenty of problems running your own hosting stack, but I like that we can solve our own problems on our own terms, and tie software decisions to hardware or data centre decisions that we make at the same time.

I eye up Kubernetes & Ganeti every few months, but they keep reminding me that if you've got the expertise, and a specific purpose in mind, you can usually build something that fits your purpose more closely.

(though the second half of that sentence will probably be written on my self- carved tombstone)

<comment><USER4> The use case I described - Skyport's cloud managed secure servers - <USER3> super high quality, self-recovering embedded code that made no assumptions about the network being high quality or reliable.

I think the thing people - and especially the OpenStack guys - don't appreciate is how terrible it is to (a) lose a workload or (b) require someone visit the datacenter (which may actually be a colo in another state or hours drive away). Having to fall back to some sort of terrible insecure management like IPMI or a dedicated mandatory management network (of questionable security), etc. is just not viable.

Systems and infrastructure architectures need to address a few things that really matter - error handling, continuous self monitoring, state compression and linear, systematic self-recovery - and while some OpenStack components handle this (ceph is pretty great except for a few things around access control and security) the whole doesn't handle them well at all. It's not enough to log a message (or worse, just log an exception stack).

<comment><USER6> I find your expectations to be unreasonably high. The self correcting system is a fiction and will always be a fiction. The indefatigable infrastructure that corrects the errant member system with 5 9s is a fiction and will always be a fiction.

<comment><USER4> It is a fiction but the answer is not to throw your hands up and ignore the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We (scientific research institute) are currently operating a relatively small commercially supported Openstack (Liberty release) installation next to our HPC infrastructure and so far it works quite well. Of course, because we are using Openstack from a commercial vendor, the installation/provisioning is quite straightforward (although there is quite a bit of complexity, if you want to do a lot of adjustments). So far we didn't have any big troubles during operations and our users (researchers) have started to use it (creating VMs for specific applications).

We will hopefully upgrade soon to the Newton release which will enable us to provide SaaS (Murano) and CaaS (Magnum) to the users. We will probably also evaluate Openshift on top of Openstack.

The biggest pain points is the integration with our existing HPC infrastructure (specifically the parallel filesystem/storage). We haven't really looked much at the code except of debugging some authentication issues, when we tried to integrate keystone with our core IT's AD, so we can't comment on that.

Additionally, the official openstack documentation (the commercially supported one is quite superficial) is often very confusing and it's very hard to find proper CHANGELOGS for each of the openstack components. Also we really don't like (or rather despise) openstack's issue tracker (Launchpad). It is very hard to find any existing issues, when we encounter some problems.

</comment><comment><USER8> At our facility, we have an OpenStack-based private cloud that we worked with Sardina Systems to put in place. It is production and we have not had any problems with it.

We have also undergone upgrade from Mitaka to Newton with zero-downtime and completed within a day (I understand that zero-downtime upgrade is a capability specific to Sardina FishOS). We will be upgrading to Ocata in the coming months.

We have found that in cloud, it is critical to separate the Operator role vs Consumer role. OpenStack is primarily Operator-facing, who are in turn providing the capabilities to serve certain Consumers. OpenStack enables the Operator to flexibly provide virtualized compute environment requested by the Consumer, while the Consumer does not care how the compute environment is provided by the Operator. With this view, lots of things become clear. Granted, not everyone in the OpenStack world have this view, but we are sure glad that we do from the early on!

Our deployment is not the largest, but we aren't small either (several hundred hypervisors). We are an organization of several 10's of thousand people, though the user base at the moment is still in the hundreds.

A number of comments here mentioned that they had live migration problems. We have not had these problems. It worked from the very beginning for us.

Our view was that we would work with a vendor on OpenStack, rather than trying to string together the parts, in the same way that we don't string together the parts that make up a Linux distribution. FishOS makes it simple for us -- and that's before looking at operational tools in the product.

I have not been involved in the commercial terms, but my understanding is that commercially we have TCO that would be hard to match otherwise.

<comment><USER9> As someone who used to work on OpenStack as 100% of my day job for 3-4 years, this comment makes so much sense.

People try and deploy OpenStack from sources, or even from Ubuntu's etc packaging.

This isn't how you should do it.. You need an opnionated vendor who meets your needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel.

Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

<comment><USER11> I figure Intel's participation was hinged on supporting a growing fleet of competitors to AWS, who would bid up chip prices. I guess that isn't happening.

IMO, OpenStack was sort of a consortium effort to compete with VMWare, AWS and Salesforce, but it's operational model is closest to AWS. Nearly all the big enterprise IT companies tied their rafts together hoping to stave the flow of customers. It doesn't appear to have worked.

RackSpace is advertising AWS migration and consulting services on podcasts I listen to. Not exactly a stellar testament for their own cloud product, but I think they still participate.

HP's strategy is a bit haphazard given the recent corporate splitup. On the plus side, the HP/HPE split seems to have allowed HPE to ditch all the weird www# URLs. They retired their public cloud, but still sell hardware that can run OpenStack at least.

Dell bought EMC, and proceeded to shut down their OpenStack offerings in favor of VMWare, which they own a substantial fraction of.

IBM is in a continual process of downsizing its hardware divisions in pursuit of higher earnings per share. It seems their big push is cloudfoundry, which seems to be more about containers and k8s.

So why are they bailing? I'm guessing:

\- it's way harder to hire support staff for OpenStack, than VMWare \- AWS reduces capital costs and upfront investments \- Customers on existing solutions aren't prepared to take advantage of new opportunities \- Many of these companies have existing product lines they don't wish to disrupt

<comment><USER12> You missed Red Hat, who seem to be the only company having major success with OpenStack [1]

Most of IBM, Intel, HPE etc have thrown in the towel and now offer their own services on top of Red Hat OpenStack.

OpenStack has now found itself beyond enterprise, and now being the de-facto platform for NFV running mobile networks, and I guess Red Hat are becoming the winner here as they are so used to supporting an OpenStack 'type of' infrastructure for large bodies such as banking, telco, health etc. When you consider Red Hat are already large well established contributors to all of the layers of the OpenStack 'stack' such as KVM/QEMU , libvirt, the kernel itself, + overlay networking tech such as OVS, and now DPDK, you can see why they are well positioned to support and run OpenStack clouds.

[1] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/red_hat_cloud_quart...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/red_hat_cloud_quarter/)

<comment><USER13> Canonical also have a strongly growing OpenStack business with no signs of pulling out from it.

<comment><USER14> (Disclaimer: I work on Red Hat in the virtualization team).

Canonical seriously lacks expertise in KVM (+QEMU+libvirt), and you cannot take that for granted when you have a customer with VMs crashing that is asking for a fix.

<comment><USER15> Those who have down-voted the above almost certainly do not know the situation on the ground.

FWIW, I recently had to explicitly inform the Canonical Virt maintainers (of which there seem to be very few) about which patches that ought to be backported to fix a bug in one of their libvirt packages that was seriously affecting (i.e. preventing from patches being merged) OpenStack upstream CI environment.

The said bug had fixes already available upstream, and are straight backports with no conflicts. No one bothered to do the "unsexy" work of backporting & cutting a quick stable build.

Only after pointing out the commits (with help from one of the lead upstream libvirt maintainers), and posting them on a LaunchPad bug, did the Ubuntu maintainers stepped in to backport the said fixes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any chance that vendors (like Intel) will care less about the API for accessing their products, as there seems to be more consolidation around API's for running applications like Kubernetes. Intel is a member of the CNCF [1] and seems to be putting money behind it. Am I reading too much into that and is Intel just a big company that puts money in lots of places?

[1]: [https://www.cncf.io/about/members/](https://www.cncf.io/about/members/)

<comment><USER17> They have an interest in a large server ecosystem in general, with options for running your own infrastructure, because it's a lot more profitable for them to sell server CPUs to many companies that don't have as much options to pressure them on price as e.g. Amazon can, and to get their special features integrated so they can use them as arguments against other CPU vendors. They don't care as much which option wins, so it makes sense to be involved with anything that seems important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sites with autoplay videos should be banned.

<comment><USER19> I very much agree. Clicked link, read five words, site started screaming some garbage advertising at me, closed tab immediately. It's not even the video that bothers me so much - it's the autoplay _audio_ that causes me to immediately close the tab and never return to a site. Ugh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I looked for another link that didn't have such obnoxious refuse...

Id' be game if you can find a less spammy site. But when I submitted this an hour ago, there wasn't any.

<comment><USER19> For what it's worth, it's fortune.com that annoyed me, not your link to it. Thanks for looking for alternatives at least :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Consortiums are inherently unstable. Marketing interests drive wild swings in participation and funding.

Open governance by individuals is much more stable. That stability benefits _both_ individuals (whose stake is not vaporized when they change employers) and businesses (who are more insulated from impulsive moves by big players).

</comment><comment><USER21> I am sad to see these negative events as someone who was in the openstack community. But I think a lot of folks knew such stuff was going to happen.

I think the mistakes made were:

1) the so-called big tent approach 2) too much complexity 3) core projects not listening to end-users, and focusing too much on the plug-in model

It is a shame because there were so many smart and hard working folks involved. It really felt like a community experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there an alternative out there for OpenStack? Perhaps a minimalist version?

<comment><USER23> If you just want clustered virtual machines, check out Ganeti[0]. It's not advertised much, but this piece of software hosts most of Googles internal infrastructure (not public facing stuff).

Unlike Openstack, it has a proper scheduler, and lets you rebalance VMs across hypervisors efficiently. Also unlike Openstack, it can restart VMs if it (or the hypervisor) dies, if you've enabled that.

And _completely orthogonal_ to Openstack, it has very strong consistency guarantees. It's not made to start 1000s of VMs in seconds, since each master node has to agree on all decisions, and each operation typically "locks" the involved hypervisor. On the other hand, I haven't been able to break it once in over six years.

Note that it really just exposes an API and comes with a superb command-line client. Some assembly required.

Source: deployed Ganeti with great success at a billion-euro company, moved on to promising "cloud" project which insisted on using Openstack and promptly quit after a year of fighting obscure bugs (and naive colleagues who did not want to try anything else :)).

(If you'd like help deploying it, I'm available!)

[0] [http://www.ganeti.org/](http://www.ganeti.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article just mentions that Intel is no longer funding OSIC, which from what I read is essentially a data center for contributors to use (for free?). I could totally see why Intel would have second thoughts about footing a server bill; I don't think it means they're officially out of OpenStack.

<comment><USER25> My understanding is that the OSIC program also included funding for Rackspace + Intel OpenStack developers, some proportion of whom will probably be losing their jobs out of this I imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> From someone not very invested in the OpenStack process it feels like all the momentum of the recent push of the project just withered away all at once. I am not sure if the container crowd ate it's lunch, where containerized appliances just solve the problem of openstack better.

<comment><USER27> OpenStack is a platform for creating an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). So it's running on some physical machines, and manages your physical machines to slice into VMs. There you get to manage / create networks, storage, etc. Basically running a private cloud in your own datacenter/basement/office. Openstack has grown more than just compute. It has a supposedly compatible interface for S3 an object storage system, for example. New components are created after major cloud services like AWS, pretty much. To manage containers or manage applications, you can use CloudFoundry/Kubernetes, but to manage the "infrastructure as a platform" (I want more machines, I want some bucket, I want to run some Lambda function, I want to upload new OS images) you need something like OpenStack. So if you want to build AWS/Digital Ocean, OpenStack is required.

<comment><USER28> This seems to get back to an interesting discussion I had with someone early in the OpenStack efforts: as a developer OpenStack doesn't directly interest me because I don't care about infrastructure. Where OpenStack had a possibility to win was to provide options for infrastructure agnosticism: if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt).

From that perspective, container solutions _are_ delivering a better developer proposition than OpenStack has yet managed. There are ways now to build container clusters that you can ship in parallel to AWS and Azure with very little code difference.

In that earlier discussion I was skeptical of OpenStack precisely because of its focus on infrastructure first. Without the buy in of being a clone for a specific cloud structure (AWS compatibility over anything else, for instance) or the backing of traditional datacenter/server vendors (IBM who eventually started into BlueMix; Microsoft whose "on premises Azure" is now firing on most cylinders but was announced as a plan early in OpenStack's history), OpenStack didn't seem to have an obvious niche in the infrastructure world. The closest to a niche it might have had in its early life was the promise of application portability between clouds and that never quite seemed to be delivered.

I can tell it frustrates infrastructure folks to hear that containers have been eating OpenStack's lunch, but that is the very real case from the developer perspective. As a developer today, I go for containers and OpenStack is no longer relevant on my radar. Sure I can run containers on OpenStack, but containers abstract away more of the infrastructure and I have less and less care what cloud(s) is underneath the container cluster. When I asked OpenStack people what OpenStack might deliver to me that vision of application portability was tantalizing but never seemed quite finished; container technologies have actually delivered that.

<comment><USER27> > if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based > infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money > from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al > (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt).

> There are ways now to build container clusters that you can ship in parallel > to AWS and Azure with very little code difference.

OpenStack is an IaaS, so just like AWS. Focus on the context. Do you want your own private cloud? Yes or not?

If no, then this discussion can end, because AWS and Azure run on their proprietary IaaS code. As a customer, you request resources from the IaaS layer, and you build your server/platform from that point.

So arguing that container clusters can ship to other clouds with very little change (almost likely writing the APIs to create a container) is unfair in the context of why one would choose container over OpenStack. The purpose is different.

If your answer is yes I am building a private cloud, how are you going to do that with Docker alone? Can you build a software-defined network with Docker? Absolutely not with Docker since Docker is a host-based deployment solution.

What you are looking for is ability to create OpenStack the same way CloudFoundry / Kubernetes are created. You write up a manifest, and the necessary databases and services are deployed to some EC2 machines. In the case of CloudFoundry, you write up a manifest file, describes number of instances, types, credentials, what not, then call Bosh to create Cloud Foundry (will create a pool of app machines, router servers, UAA, etcd etc). Machines are created based on a stemcell, basically an image. You want to create your IaaS based on images. You want to be able to script up a manifest and deploy your IaaS. You want a lift and drop IaaS infrastructure. Container can do that, but it cannot be done simply with Docker. You need that infrastructure abstraction layer to cover up. That's probably what Docker Enterprise Edition might do, but I have not really dig into it yet.

<comment><USER28> Yes, it is an unfair comparison. I was attempting to explain in my comment why I consider it a _valid_ unfair comparison, because it is a matter of perspective.

As a software developer, do I ever want a private cloud? No. Does my employer? Maybe. Is it my job to tell them how to invest their infrastructure dollars? Quite possibly no, because software development and infrastructure are typically held at arms length. But even when they are not in a "proper" DevOps shop, the ballgame of which cloud is then subservient to developer convenience and how easy it is to deploy software to a cloud and how productive developers are writing software for that cloud.

So yes, the purpose of OpenStack and Container technologies are very different and I appreciate that technically. In terms of real world value to me as a software developer, however, I have platform problems not infrastructure problems. I don't care what the infrastructure is under the service so long as it provides a stable, reliable platform for me to build upon. Containers abstract that for me in a way that solves real platform problems that OpenStack was only ever relevant to me in so far as its ability to once hint at a possible solution to. That's not fair and that was expecting too much from OpenStack at the time, but that's life.

<comment><USER27> Okay, I was reading it as defending why container would solve what OpenStack was set out to solve, which is the proposition I read from the OP I was replying to.

Of course, I would advise against running a private cloud unless there is a dedicated team of at least a dozen or so. I applaud Digital Ocean for able to survive and make good business from their private cloud. As a developer I totally agree I just want my code to be deployed and that all the appendices are deployed and configured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I ran an OpenStack cluster in my house for a few years. The deployment was managed by a bunch of scripts which I wrote and published to help others learn the basics in deploying an OpenStack cluster, sans most of the more complicated networking stuff. Last count, about 25K unique IPs downloaded the images used in those scripts to launch test instances. At one time I held the top 3rd or 4th link on Google for "openstack install".

A few years ago, I leveraged a bunch of methods in OpenStack to build a _thing_ which would launch instances based on Bitcoin payments to certain preloaded addresses. These addresses allowed "templates" to be associated with cluster capabilities and code to be deployed. Payments to that address in Bitcoin would immediately net you an instance, of a certain type, on someone's infrastructure.

The general idea behind this creation was a way to abstract hardware components into a system by which applications could launch themselves and utilize the resources provided in a fair, secure and trustworthy way. It is my belief this model was WAY ahead of it's time, a precursor to the hybrid models we see emerging today, and lead directly to my personal realization that federation of all systems will be a basic requirement for implementing trusted computing in the future. We're going to need it with AI. Not sure how I know that, but there it is, irrationality and all.

Unfortunately, standardizing deployment methodologies doesn't net you federation. Standardization itself doesn't net you trust, unless everyone can agree on the standard, which is out of necessity done in an non-trustworthy way. Votes of a board, for example, aren't represented with fair consensus, unless there's an algorithm behind the votes. Otherwise, votes end up being slightly irrational, because people behind the votes are slightly irrational. Or very irrational, depending on the company they work for.

And yes, federation can be implemented in a trustworthy way by a corporation, such as Google or Amazon, but that requires all people in _that_ federation (a discrete group) agree they will use this _thing_ to implement trust, even though the _thing_ may not actually have trust implemented in a rational way (i.e. by algorithm).

At the end of the day, OpenStack was doomed not because of container tech, or the structure of the board, or who ran the biggest cluster, or because it was overly complicated for simple use cases.

It failed because it did not implement the basic requirement of delivering trusted infrastructure in a scalable and trustworthy way across a broad range of infrastructure, in a wide range of locations, and do so in a way that separates the use of the infras from the irrationality of humans running the infra.

Until something does that, and does it well, we're stuck with Google, Amazon and other provider's solutions. This is also a good rationalization for the continued increase of cloud services by companies and the continued emergence of hybrid models in the future.

</comment><comment><USER30> I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.

<comment><USER31> I'm at one of the only companies I know of outside Rackspace that's running it in production. We're doing a very poor job of it; we never hit production with any effort to upgrade the cluster in the past three years, so we're still running Havana with Nova Network.

The most likely upgrade path for us right now is VMWare 6.5.

<comment><USER32> I worked for a company (Nobis Technology Group) that was acquired by LeaseWeb USA; I was a part of the "server automation" team and was somewhat reluctantly "forced out" of the team after the transition (they basically offered to pay me a smaller salary to work for them - do I look stupid?).

The team was essentially dissolved several months later, as I knew it would be.

But for the short period I was there (about 2 years), it was a great place to work, and a high point in my total career. Prior to that position, I had been doing web development in PHP pretty much exclusively. Doing server automation was a completely new space to me.

Soon after starting, our team was tasked with a migration to OpenStack. Since our current infrastructure front-end was already based on PHP, I got tasked with looking into how or if we could use PHP OpenCloud to work with OpenStack. It seemed workable to me; I was able to extend the classes in such a way using namespaces and other techniques so that we could add additional capabilities to the interface that weren't already supported (and there were a lot of holes to fill!), but wouldn't break things if/when we had to upgrade OpenCloud (this was ultimately tested a couple times I was there, and the changes proved flawless - at least on the PHP side).

Ultimately, we had a nice stable front-end that worked well with both our original system (some VM architecture that I forget) and the new "cloud" infrastructure based around OpenStack. In effect, a user could deploy either an actual server (if available), provision a VM (if a server was available), or build a cloud server "system" from a myriad of parts (we tried to support and provide as much access to the OpenStack stuff as we could). We also had a RESTful API for clients to also used (some of our clients resold our services under their own names). Some of the backend stuff was a bit "messy" in how it worked (I won't go into details, but I "authored" a fake "O'Reilly" "book" (really just a front "cover" mainly) whose mascot was dickbutt) - but despite the mess, overall it worked well, considering all the moving parts (where it would tend to fall down - not always, but enough - was when an upgrade to OpenStack was performed).

In short - we were also one of the few companies running OpenStack in production. Our owners ended up selling to LeaseWeb, I left - but the idea was that LeaseWeb wanted to transition things to their API and system, and I honestly don't know what happened with all the work and such I was involved in on the PHP side of things (there was also a point where me and a coworker had to quickly ramp up and learn GoLang to make an interface from Rancher/Docker over to the Nobis API - that was a fun and interesting experience). I imagine that some portion is still running, but who knows.

I personally think that in the right hands and with the right infrastructure OpenStack can be a very workable and working technology. It seemed to work well for the systems we used while I was at Nobis. I don't know honestly whether you could use it to scale up to anything like AWS or Google's offerings, but I think for medium-sized stuff like we were doing (or like Digital Ocean does - who at the time was our direct competition), it can work well - at least as I experienced things.

<comment><USER31> I don't disagree with you at all. For our uses, it was a stupid amount of overkill specced by someone whose job was the same as his hobby. We don't have anywhere near the need to scale that such a system was designed for, the hardware that was specified was very poorly considered, and no maintenance was ever done on it except for daily care and feeding -- which quickly grew to consume all of the previous engineering team's day.

When the previous engineering team was shown the door, the entire system had no maintenance and no path forward. It's an epic management fail, but ... let's just color me cynically and sarcastically surprised that I used "management" and "fail" in the same sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Worked for rs in the early 2000s. The culture was pretty cutthroat and it was the chiselers and greasy guys who moved up.

I worked as a dc tech during the .com bust recovery period and the level of incompetence and the personalities I encountered led me to leave < 6 months.

Any decent SA from my generation can code a one-off virtualization base without too much problem using kvm/qemu. LXC is a clean in-fit to that. Sounds like this is standard RS procedure. Fleece the idiots, use the willing, and promote the owlshit.</comment>


Why didn't you back me up? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/108159551615224338529/posts/L4wawXpNt25 <comment><USER3> If you (man or woman) work somewhere where the culture is harassing/hostile to women (or to anyone), you should take it seriously and either work elsewhere or try to stop it.

It's surprising how far some men will go if the behavior is tolerated. Often socially dominant men or those who have some kind of position of authority will get worse and worse. They will often not address the comments at anyone in particular but will just say lewd things and talk about sexual topics when doing so is not invited or warranted, often mixed with humor.

When a joke is told by a person with some authority, the response is typically laughter, even if the joke was inappropriate. Even those who might otherwise disapprove tend not to say anything.

Many women are just ambitious enough to ignore it, thinking that such behavior is in their best career interest (and it may be).

Some people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to feminism, but the important thing to realize is that when you are a woman you have to constantly turn down sex and sexual interest from males. This is true 100x for attractive women. When coupled with organizational power dynamics this is a very serious issue because it causes the victims extra stress and is bullying and unfair.

To generalize, don't ever hire or work with anyone you'd characterize as a bully.

<comment><USER4> _> If you (man or woman) work somewhere where the culture is harassing/hostile to women (or to anyone), you should take it seriously and either work elsewhere or try to stop it._

This is true. However, _this incident_ \- by itself - isn't evidence of a "culture that is harassing/hostile to women" at Google. All I see in _this incident_ is evidence of a single employee, making a single inappropriate comment, with an over-the-top, attention seeking reaction by its recipient. This is a matter for HR - not for Twitter/Google+.

On the bright side, this is probably the most action that Google+ has seen in quite a while.

<comment><USER5> If you actually read through it all, you'll see that she poured her drink on him after that ridiculous comment, then _he_ reported _her_ to HR for that. She got reprimanded, he got promoted.

At least that is what is being alleged. Your comment is pretty insensitive in that context.

<comment><USER4> _> Your comment is pretty insensitive in that context._

I'm not sure how. He made an an inexcusable comment to her. If she felt this strongly about it, she should have taken her drink with her to HR - immediately (or as soon as practical thereafter). She would have been in a much stronger position at that point. He acted inappropriately, and she responded inappropriately.

My comment was not intended to deny the possibility of a hostile culture at Google. My point was that this incident, by itself, doesn't stand up as evidence of such a culture. Too many people read a single headline and interpret it as the rule, not the exception.

<comment><USER6> It's insensitive in that your are making a false balance fallacy by equating his actions with her reaction by saying something like "He acted inappropriately, and she responded inappropriately". She was sexually harrassed, her reaction is pretty minor in this discussion.

<comment><USER4> _> her reaction is pretty minor in this discussion_

Let me be clear that I believe this guy to be a jackass - not only for making the comment, but then having the nerve to officially complain about the drink. I likely would have terminated him. But by reacting the way she did, she took away any leverage that she had, and that was reflected in the outcome.

So, no, her reaction isn't "pretty minor in this discussion". It actually had a huge impact on the negative outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This needs to be investigated quickly. We don't know the details. She forced their hand and they'll have to respond publicly about this. It sounds like a last resort type action after stonewalling and lack of support.

If this is true, it is very sickening. Often this is talked about in general terms -- there is sexism, harassment, comments, jokes, etc. out there -- in the "industry". But in this case there is particular person and particular incident that took place. Hopefully this is not ignored.

We just recently talked about Adria Richards again (the Pycon incident from a few years back). And one point I was trying to make regarding that incident was that it should have been separated from harassment and discrimination discourse. It was about PR and about a personal agenda. The reason for it, is because if it is isn't, it hurts and diminishes other future sexual harassment allegations -- it reduces them to "she is just probably pulling an Adria on us". Besides the harm caused to all the parties in that controversy, there was a much larger harm, and that is a future harm to cause of preventing and rooting out these horrible things.

I have a daughter, and it sickens me that one day should have choose to persue a career with these companies she would have to deal with this kind stuff. And if this is true, I somehow didn't expect this from Google. I could see this happening at an investment firm, at a hospital, at a legal firm but not with Google, which seemingly go out of their way to tell the world how inclusive, and non-discriminantory and not evil they are.

<comment><USER8> > I could see this happening an investment firm, at a hospital, at a _legal > firm_ but not with Google

Less than 5% of senior VCs, and 5% of F500 CEOs, are women, while more than 20% of F500 general counsel are. Some people are immune, of course, by virtue of their status, but for most people, it's an environment where you don't want to develop a reputation. Especially if you're young--1/3 of new large law firm partners are women in recent years.

I would imagine the situation is similar for medicine too. I can have an easier time picturing this sort of comment at an investment bank, but these days even Wall Street is more drug tests than it is hookers and blow.

My experience in both fields is why I think that the gender disparity needs to be addressed directly, because it is self-perpetuating. An environment where 90% of your bosses and 80% of your coworkers are all men is conducive to a culture that keeps those skewed ratios in place.

<comment><USER9> Also just the fact that once you hit 53,000 people, you can't really say "I didn't expect this from X company" as if the company is a single person whose character is automatically imbued into every employee.

<comment><USER7> I say it vis-a-vis the public image that company is presenting. Google for years reaped the benefits, so to speak, from presenting themselves as ethically and morally a better entity than others. But now they also have to reap the criticism due to their perceived hypocrisy.

<comment><USER9> It's all about perception I guess. Even if you have fewer occurrences of it per X employees (not saying they do - I don't know) and you actually are better, it's easier to talk about it like it's the new norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please don't take this as an excuse for sexual harassment, but:

As a manager, I wouldn't go on a beach/bikini/swimsuit trip with my team, and certainly not one with large amounts of alcohol (which wasn't necessarily part of the story posted). So many reasons:

* I don't WANT the people who report to me to see my pale un-muscled body. Or the people above me!

* I don't want to accidentally glance at someone and make them feel uncomfortable.

* I don't want to get so loose and comfortable (cue alcohol) around my team that I forget the role I must play as a leader.

I recently declined the opportunity to go on a boat beer bash, just to maintain the proper professional relationship (and these were peers in the org).

<comment><USER11> There is an excellent argument to be made that the prevalence of alcohol in American work culture is weird and stupid. Partly because it fuels sexual harassment, partly because it pressures people who don't or can't drink, and partly because really, the purpose of alcohol in a social context is to suspend your self-control at least a little bit, why would you want that _at work_?

Relatedly, see also [https://medium.com/@betsythemuffin/drinkups-are-rape- culture...](https://medium.com/@betsythemuffin/drinkups-are-rape- culture-29ea1546e91d)

<comment><USER12> Not saying you're right or wrong, but aren't there dozens of cultures across the world where where alcohol plays a much, much bigger role in work culture? The UK and Japan, for example.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, "US" is just what I'm familiar with and what the topic of the story is. I wanted to be precise (because people do rightly criticize folks who complain about US-only culture problems as if they're universal) but was too precise. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quite a long thread but holy crap, this behavior and what is described on Kelly's twitter feed ([https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok](https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok)) are sickening.

Quite shocked that this is considered acceptable at such high levels at Google.

<comment><USER13> Yonatan Zunger's comment on the G+ post is illuminating:

"Damned straight, I wouldn't. But at this point numerous legal issues kick in so I can't say anything further in public, including any of the obscenities I'm thinking right now."

My read on that is that he _doesn 't_ consider it acceptable, but any public show of support or acknowledgment that the incidents in question occurred would be construed as an admission of guilt by Google, which would open them up to a sexual harassment lawsuit. So ironically, the same laws that are designed to protect women in the workforce strip them of support from anyone who is a high-ranking official in the company that employs them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the eng director in question got a private reprimand, but doing anything career-affecting (like removing him from a management chain, or firing him) requires significant documentation of a pattern of behavior...which is hard to generate when his accusers (quite understandably) leave the company.

<comment><USER14> What would be the consequences to Zunger if he did elaborate? Why _must_ he protect Google from a lawsuit?

<comment><USER13> He doesn't have to on a personal level, but on a professional level, he is an agent of the company and must act in the company's best interests. If he doesn't, he's not doing his job and can be fired.

The irony is that if you escalated to _Larry_ I bet he'd think that the quotes documented here are appalling - and his hands would still be tied. Because he has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders of Google Inc, and it is not in their interests to get sued by an employee. Which again goes to show how dumb the idea of "maximizing shareholder value" is, but then, it's the environment we live under.

<comment><USER15> I really doubt that anyone's hands are actually tied. He could say whatever he wants, like how it's totally unacceptable and anyone acting like that should be dismissed. He could easily say it's in the company's interest because it shows Google stands up for women, which is good for Google's image and talent recruiting.

That's why when people pull out "maximizing shareholder value", I think they're quite exaggerating on what that entails. I'd be surprised if any laws or penalties apply to normal operating judgements. It's gotta be more for scenarios like a company selling a subsidiary at below-market price, or obviously negative-financial stuff like that.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, this is exactly what I was getting at. I don't know why every hour and day he delays is not an indictment on his character; maybe he is tied in ways I don't know, but if not, why isn't he acting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just a couple of links and quotes from the EEOC. TLDR: Harassment at a work retreat is still harassment. One inappropriate comment is usually not enough from a legal point of view. She is protected from retaliation.

[http://eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm](http://eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm)

"Harassment outside of the workplace may also be illegal if there is a link with the workplace. For example, if a supervisor harasses an employee while driving the employee to a meeting."

[http://eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm](http://eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm)

"Although the law doesn't prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted)."

[http://eeoc.gov/laws/types/retaliation.cfm](http://eeoc.gov/laws/types/retaliation.cfm)

All of the laws we enforce make it illegal to fire, demote, harass, or otherwise "retaliate" against people (applicants or employees) because they filed a charge of discrimination, because they complained to their employer or other covered entity about discrimination on the job, or because they participated in an employment discrimination proceeding (such as an investigation or lawsuit).

<comment><USER17> She was reprimanded for accusing the person directly, in front of other employees. Huge difference and I can't see the EEOC covering that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm glad that Kelly Ellis chose to include a direct quote from Rod Chavez. Without any additional context, it definitely looks very harassing, and he should be fired for it. That said, some of the stuff she's written in the past is over-the-top radical (from [https://medium.com/@kellyellis/commuting-by- myself-714e6dc47...](https://medium.com/@kellyellis/commuting-by- myself-714e6dc47c18)):

 _If you are a strange man trying to talk to me on my way to or from work, when I am commuting alone, you are a harasser, pure and simple. You are threatening. And you need to leave me the fuck alone._

I hope this isn't another Adria Richards, Virginia Tech, or Duke Lacrosse situation. I wouldn't necessarily characterize what Vic Gundotra said as harassing, either the compliment or the Sasha Grey comment. Sasha Grey was absolutely hot-as-in-buzz, which would be relevant to someone working on Google+. I'd like to hear the other side of the story before stoning these guys, given the propensity some women have for playing up their victim status to self-promote in the media. That Kelly characterizes herself as a "bitch software engineer, doing what I can to smash the patriarcy", really drives this home. It would be a shame if these men's careers are destroyed for anything less than a whole-truth. Kelly certainly seems predisposed to view any slight as the result of her gender, and any comment that could be construed inappropriate as inappropriate. It would be a true tragedy if men disengaged from female peers and reports out of a fear of career destruction, even from the smallest gaffe, in the same way that many have shied away from interacting with children.

<comment><USER19> I don't think a desire to be left alone is radical. Most women desire this, they don't want strangers coming up and talking to them when they're stuck on a train/bus where there's no option to leave. A simple "hi" is the limit of social interaction you should try to push on a stranger in this situation.

<comment><USER20> I've heard women complaining for the exact opposite. Men not brave enough to engage with them casually. I guess it depends if the man looks like George Clooney.

<comment><USER19> That's pretty much it. It's creepy and harassment if a regular guy approaches them. It's what they want if the guy is attractive and she's in the right location. There's no way to know if they find you attractive so it's always harassment from the guy's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems pretty damn unacceptable.

I'm sick of working with overgrown children in our industry, who can't behave like reasonable human beings around women. It's just wrong.

I'm also sick of all-male teams put together by male managers who have decided women can't do this work.

Grow up. Drop the prejudice. We'll all be better off.

<comment><USER22> Those seem like pretty large generalizations for someone telling others to drop prejudice.

<comment><USER21> I've worked in a dozen or so places in three countries. In my experience it's commonplace. Hence why I expressed that I am sick of it. If you haven't come across this at all then IMHO you're very lucky and perhaps you'd like to share the names of your enlightened employers?

<comment><USER22> What is the common factor in all these destructive relationships with co- workers over so many different companies and environments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On her twitter page she describes herself as:

 _Kelly Ellis - "bitchy software engineer. doing what i can to smash the patriarchy."_

I'd really like to know the context of the quoted "harassment" statement, if this was at work or during drinks afterwards, if it was a badly timed joke, a badly worded praise for fixing an issue, if this just happened once, or multiple times. And the reason for making this public...

Before I start publicly crucifying anyone and removing them from all future gainful employment.

Harassment is repetitive pressure or intimidation. Not a once off joke made by a person because he though they where getting together well and he brought down his guard for a second.

<comment><USER24> Had the exact same reaction, but you've got to read the whole twitter stream to realize that this is maybe a global management issue, and not just one guy.

She did complain to her bosses, that did nothing, and the guy clearly isn't the only one to make those kind of remarks in the company.

<comment><USER23> From what I've been able to put together, she posted all the instances of the alleged "harassment", which consists of the quoted comment, and this one (made by another Google employee) -

 _" You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star."_

It also seems like both statements where made years apart, and possibly happened after work.

And one of the accused persons already has made the statement that he had little to no contact with her aside from being in the same org.

<comment><USER24> It seemed to me like a general atmosphere very male oriented, which she felt very akward with ( eg the comment about the pornstar). But the fact that she complained to HR and that as a consequence she ended up feeling like she had to leave makes me think there could be an issue.

Although as a european, of course all of this debate seems very American ( except maybe the ass grabbing part, which could only have been excused if under influence).

<comment><USER25> > But the fact that she complained to HR and that as a consequence she ended > up feeling like she had to leave makes me think there could be an issue.

There may very well be an issue, but note that you are now repeating an unsubstantiated allegation and describing it as fact.

 _If_ what she wrote is accurate and factual, and they very well may be, then at least the director in question likely went far over the line, regardless of context, and there may very well be issues with the general culture too.

But we have a few tweets, and don't have the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone summarize what is alleged to have happened, including names of those involved? It's a pain to piece together all the fragments of information.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe companies need to just stop having retreats/events that have all the outward appearance of social gatherings but all the same professionalism rules as the officeplace except for the not wearing a swimsuit to work part.

<comment><USER14> Do you believe that prohibition of sexual harassment is a "professionalism rule"? Because this would imply that in other areas of everyday life, where professionalism is not relevant, you believe that sexual harassment is/should be permitted.

<comment><USER17> I guess this needs explaining. An employee might sexually harass another employee, for which he or she should be punished. But a company can also be liable for creating conditions which allow sexual harassment to flourish. I am arguing that hosting events that blur the line between work and not-work contribute to sexual harassment. These things are not as black and white as some people on Hacker News think they are. Also, you're begging the question. Outside of a professional setting, telling someone they look good in a bikini being sexual harassment is HIGHLY dependent on context.

<comment><USER14> Does "telling someone they look good in a bikini" characterize the situation at hand? I really don't think so.

I think it would be hard to categorize social events as potentially creating a bad environment or not. A different solution would be explicit rules for all social events, no? This would be easy to implement.

<comment><USER17> I used that example because it is the lower bounds (in terms of offensiveness) of the claims made by the complainant. She obviously felt it was a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would like to hear the man's side of it. Is it bad to ask that? Would I be vilified for not trusting the woman?

<comment><USER14> I don't know about vilified. I would ask why you don't trust the woman, and do trust the man, given the historical record.

<comment><USER28> Why frame all of this in terms of 'trust'? Must you trust either of the genders? Why not look at the facts of the matter? For that, you need to start by looking at both sides of the story instead of taking sides.

<comment><USER14> The rich historical record of male violence against women is why.

<comment><USER29> Very funny. It took less than 5 minutes to confirm that the violence goes the _other_ way at least half the time. It's just not taken as seriously because... well, have you heard the phrase "you hit like a girl"?

[http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2000-15524-001)

[http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men- than-...](http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women- victims-of-partner-abuse/)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=domestic+violence+gender+rat...](https://www.google.com/search?q=domestic+violence+gender+ratio)

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=domestic+violence+gender...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=domestic+violence+gender+ratio)

<comment><USER30> Wow, it took less than 5 minutes to find random internet justification for your wildly unrealistic notion. Bravo sir on your googling skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> She then added "full disclosure. I'm not proud, I poured a drink on him. It became about that."

[http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former- google-e...](http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former-google- engineer-claims-she-was-sexually-harassed-google-did-nothing-about-it)

</comment><comment><USER32> The only thing I have learnt from this and the Adria Richards nonsense is when I am hiring I will screen for radical feminism.

Too risky to hire, even if I feel my workplace shouldn't have anything that would set them off it's still too risky.

<comment><USER33> It's an unfortunate side-effect of there being so few women in tech. You're semi-forced into hiring potentially toxic personalities so you can keep up your 'quota'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I kept thinking there was more to this story, but this article makes it plain that there isn't: [http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former- google-e...](http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former-google- engineer-claims-she-was-sexually-harassed-google-did-nothing-about-it)

Lines that you use on women in clubs should not be used with co-workers. That's the lesson here basically. I doubt either of those guys had any inkling they were causing emotional trauma.

<comment><USER35> Also, it sounds like Google might have screwed up in their handling of the situation. The guy should have gotten some kind of reprimand. I suspect the current Google employees won't be happy about how this has been handled, and will force management to do something. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an internal investigation.

If Google HR had handled this properly in the first place, Kelly would still be working there, everyone would be happy, and this would never have become a news story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't really feel like chasing down and piecing together hundreds of tweets to understand what happened here. Anyone who did it mind giving the whole story?

<comment><USER37> My favorite? This idiot right here:

[https://twitter.com/AndrewMDodson](https://twitter.com/AndrewMDodson)

Really. I .. ignore his profile description for now. Read the links to Kelly's tweets and look out for this gem. He's a master of being an asshole, but among lots of peers.

If you're in the mood: Get back to the link above, read his self-description and .. cackle. I mean.. What?

(I might fall for a troll account, because .. I have a hard time believing that someone is that far removed from reality)

<comment><USER38> No he's serious and there really are people like him out there.

<comment><USER39> Plenty of dudes like that in this thread as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I want to make this very very clear to everyone, especially young coders new to the corporate world. HR is not there to protect you. They are there to protect the company. And in 99.9% of the cases they will always support the ones higher up in the corporate structure, managers, and especially senior VPs. Does that excuse all this? Certainly not, but I'm completely unsurprised that HR didn't do anything about this.

<comment><USER41> Sounds to me like HR did not even protect the company here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So every time there is an HR dispute it is news worthy? Let the lawyers settle this.

<comment><USER43> This story appears to go beyond a simple HR dispute, but is endemic of a culture all too common in our industry that we should have zero tolerance of and should work to undermine. It appears that not only were inappropriate statements made, but other high-ups at Google weren't willing to stand up for what's right. Considering this happened at an employer of many readers on this site who may have additional insights or stories to add, I think it's perfectly reasonable to have posted here.

<comment><USER44> Exactly. It would be interesting to hear from some Google employees here, both men and women, about their good or bad sexism related experiences at the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Off-topic: Going over the 100 or so comments over the pas 30mins was dare i say entertaining. It took me a few mins of self-reflection after i finished reading this on HN and thought - Why am i feeling happy after reading this?

This discussion has all the elements of a hit reality tv show. A victim, an aggressor, opinion extremists on either side, moderators on the fence.

I despise reality tv shows and make it a point not to watch them or read about the latest "incident" on show X etc. Now i cannot stop feeling that reading this discussion has broken my >1year-long streak of avoiding reality shows.

<comment><USER14> Believing women about male violence they have experience is not "extreme", given the historical record and the facts of statistics.

I would say that you know this already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Some of the more significant tweets:

" At Google I was sexually harassed by someone who was later promoted to director

I was put in a position where I couldn't be promoted because it would've meant reporting to my harasser

I was actually reprimanded for undermining him in front of his reports.

Google caring about women is 100% lip service PR bullshit.

When it comes down to it, they punish victims and reward the perpetrators. COME AT ME BRO

People above his level knew; reprimanded me instead of him.

...

Full disclosure. I'm not proud. I poured a drink on him. It became about that

Things other women have said to me: "he is a legal liability for Google"

They 100% supported him, let me be in a position where I couldn't be promoted. My career was ended in that moment. Yet I got in trouble

...

[name redacted] is an engineering director at Google, he sexually harassed me, Google did nothing about it. Reprimanded me instead of him

...

TBH [different name redacted] has always been a creep and a half too. This will surprise no one who's worked with him.

Thanks for all the bathing suit compliments over the years, [name].

...

"It's taking all of my self control not to grab your ass right now." -My boss's boss, to me, when I was a junior eng at Google.

"You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." \- [name redacted], to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.

Drinks after work with powerful men. Being the only woman there. Feeling uncomfortable with what some of them were saying. Crying about it.

Not wanting to say anything because having those social relationships were helpful to me, my visibility, my career. It's such a boys' club.

...

"He feels like you humiliated him in front of his reports." Something HR actually fucking said to me.

...

Of course, whenever anyone said something that made me uncomfortable, I had to laugh it off. None of this is stuff I ever talked to HR about

...

[name redacted] to [name redacted] within earshot of me, on a boat in Maui: "doesn't Kelly look amazing heh heh"

...

After hours, having drinks with Vic and the gang. Vic talking about how G+ was promoting Sasha Grey. Starts talking about how hot she is.

Asks if people've seen her movies. At this point I run away and cry because I felt so outcast. This is just one example of many

The harassment "training" at Goog? Mostly about not getting in trouble. Nothing about respecting humanity of your peers. "

</comment><comment><USER47> I would love to be a fly on the wall to see how this discussion is taking place at Google. This is especially relevant now that Google is hosting a Women Techmakers event for International Women's Day.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's so strange reading this thread. Everybody seems to know each other. I wonder if something like this happened at my workplace, if the discussion would also go public like this..

</comment><comment><USER49> What's the context of the statement? For all we know, it could've been an offhand joke by a drunk co-worker at a happy hour while the two were flirting.

<comment><USER50> [https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/574069743134486528](https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/574069743134486528)

There is no context where that would be appropriate.

<comment><USER51> Yes there is. If they were drinking and saying they were attracted to one another. If they were lovers and hiding it infront of co workers.

Wr dont know the context , and while i agree it doesnt sound that way, it may be explainable.

Its more likely some douche with beer in him and should be fired, but there is a case where that comment is appropriate.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, if either of those were the case, we'd never hear about it, would we? She felt sufficiently disturbed to call him out.

I take a pretty skeptical 'two sides to every story' stance on many of these kinds of reports but I can't think of any context given what's happened that this Director's actions toward an employee would be anywhere near appropriate. It is not even close. Unless she is a liar and pulling this out of thin air (and there is no reason I know of to think so) this is a serious breach.

<comment><USER51> I certainly agree, i just dont like the idea that this sort of comment is never appropriate. Hell ive said something siilar to that to my wife on occasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Since when did Twitter became the platform the lunge civil or criminal complaints against some one?

When you use "social media" in such manner there is only one goal for this and it's to turn the media fed sheep herd into the judge, jury and executioner.

If any one is harassed at work make a complaint with HR, they don't do shit, then escalate it to which ever authority manages this in the state (and I'm 100% sure there is one even tho it's not the "civilized union of socialists states" AKA Europe).

If that doesn't work and you feel like you are being derailed sue them, I'm pretty sure that there will be a 1000 lawyers willing to take your case for a chance of a payout a tech giant of the scale of Google will have to cough out even if the complaint is completely bogus.

However I have no sympathy for people who use these types of platforms to settle disputes or to report wrong doing even in such cases in which they were actually harassed. I do hope she, and any one else man, woman, or other that uses such tactics to get what they want gets fired.

But heck as long as we using verbatim - "bitchy software engineer. doing what i can to smash the patriarchy." rock on "bitch"!

<comment><USER54> >>If any one is harassed at work make a complaint with HR

I agree with you in general, but no, please don't do this. The reason has been discussed many times on HN. Basically, HR is not your friend. They aren't a "mommy" or "daddy" figure that you can complain to when someone mistreats you. Their primary job is to protect the company from troublemaker employees - <USER2> as those who file complaints about their coworkers. If you report a coworker, especially for a potentially litigious thing like harassment, HR will nod and assure you that they will handle it, but secretly think "this guy is a walking lawsuit" and find a seemingly unrelated reason to terminate you (or make you leave).

I only talk to HR for administrative stuff, such as benefits paperwork and other such trivia. I advise everyone do the same.

<comment><USER53> In Europe, or at least in the UK many companies have actual "external" companies that manage harassment cases.

I can't speak for Google or US law for that matter, but I'm pretty sure that there are enough options to get this matter settled without getting fired if the case is just. And if not you are fighting the wrong battles, if the laws and policies of such companies in the states do not provide an actual safe environment to make complaints then that's the battle you should be waging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe her, and I believe by the historical record that her male harasser incapable of being a "director" of people, that is, the word "people" defined to include women.

</comment><comment><USER55> This guy sounds like a major league twerp. And frankly, reading Kelley's twitter profile, so does she.

I would look into this to determine who I thought was more at fault, but really, twerp soap operas aren't my thing.

I don't know which I dislike more. Guys that act like asshats, or ladies that put up with it as long as they think it's getting them somewhere then scream bloody murder when it isn't anymore. Or maybe articles written about the subject. Or comments taking the sides of any one particular twerp. It's a toss up I guess.

</comment><comment><USER56> [https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/574248445780733954](https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/574248445780733954)

A compliment alone should not constitute sexual harassment, that would be total madness. However with the other stories she tells I understand why she included this.

Nevertheless this got me thinking: could we consider overly sexy looks a form of harassment too? (Unrelated to the specific story; I'm sure she didn't intentionally try to attract her bosses' attention.)

As a male, the mere presence of an overly sexy woman can put me in a state similar to fear: rising heart rate, mild trembling, goosebumps, inability to concentrate on whatever I was doing (talking to someone or doing work) etc.

<comment><USER57> I have a pair of pants that I bought from a friends' startup which are, um, well-fitting enough that my wife has told me:

1) they're her favorite pair of my pants.

2) wearing them at work might be sexual harassment.

The manufacturer brands themselves as professional, so it's not like I'm trying to do a David Bowie impression. They're very comfortable and look nice, so I'd prefer to keep wearing them unless they're actually improper. Is there a good way to definitively determine this without asking awkward questions of the women in my office?

<comment><USER58> Ask your wife if she would be ok with you wearing them to dinner with her parents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I doubt this is a male/female issue. This manager most likely lacks respect for all people.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, I'm sure he would have been just as likely to say "It's taking all of my self control not to grab your ass right now" to a dude, right?

<comment><USER59> You're a moron. It's possible for a man to disrespect a man.

<comment><USER60> I agree with your second point and disagree with your first one. I don't see how either is a rebuttal to what I wrote, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> It is pretty amazing that we've taken computing, a field that has traditionally been a refuge of social outcasts, and turned it into an environment where being a tactless creep is outrage worthy.

<comment><USER62> > social outcast

> tactless creep

What does either of these have to do with the other? I don't think social outcast implies tactless creep, and unfortunately, tactless creep clearly doesn't imply social outcast.

<comment><USER61> You're setting up a straw man of equivalence.

> I don't think social outcast implies tactless creep

Of course, because there is more than one way to lack social skills.

> tactless creep clearly doesn't imply social outcast

Outcasts go on to form their own organizations (eg Google). Someone can progress to fit in reasonably, but that doesn't mean they're completely normal (in this instance, hitting on someone who is not interested).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Well, that is bad!

</comment><comment><USER64> NOT a good sign when his Google+ profile publicly contains photos like this (NSFW): [https://plus.google.com/+RoderickChavez/photos/photo/5184662...](https://plus.google.com/+RoderickChavez/photos/photo/5184662201460305938?pid=5184662201460305938&oid=102273535472013532291)

Definitely a creeper.

<comment><USER29> Depends. If that's a random coworker who wasn't expecting that, then yeah. If it's... say... an S/O he's doing home improvement projects with (the impression I get from the rest of the album it's in), not so much.

Of course, you'd think someone working at Google would have a better understanding of how the G+ privacy settings work (and of the dangerous capriciousness of the Internet)...

<comment><USER64> True, the content itself isn't necessarily malicious in nature, but the way you present yourself publicly says a lot about your personality (or at least, how I will perceive it). I didn't consider the possibility that maybe he doesn't understand privacy settings, which would be pretty odd for a director of engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> You know the problem with these claims is that you never know what actually happened. I find that quite often these threads just reinforce the hate and blindness in people - it doesn't fix anything.

You get called out for kindly offering a woman coffee when you're making yours at the machine. Offering it to a man is ok. Being a woman offering it to a man, the man will looked at as if he's manipulated her to do that. That's fucked up.

This is very bay-area specific, and it's quite toxic.

When you see something that is obviously wrong, or know the facts, do act. Make it stop.

When you don't, be curious - instead of hating with passion. Remember that people are actually innocent until proven guilty. Even if it's cool to hate (specially white males). Otherwise, it destroys you and the very things you're fighting for. Every single time.

<comment><USER14> I believe her, which means I believe I know what happened. It is you who is electing to entertain the possibility that she is lying.

<comment><USER65> You _believe_.

And that's exactly why people died for principles such as innocent until proven guilty. Regardless of the cause. Heck, if people didn't _believe_ stuff at random we'd have far less wars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why do you need back up? Why couldn't you deal with it at the time?

Its a shame perhaps that men and women are not typically given the same upbringing, or have the same natural tendencies, when it comes to confrontation.

Not doing anything about it at the time, then moaning about it after the fact, as a man, is social suicide - its cowardly and makes you look weak.

As a woman these same behaviours are lauded as self control and intelligence - and the opposite, as being reactionary and thoughtless. You may be labelled as bossy, a control freak or worse...

Neither of these attitudes is quite right... however I do think that people need to stick up for themselves. Don't expect any back up and fight your own corner... but then I am a man, and this is our default attitude. 'being a man' very much means being strong, independent, self-reliant and unassailable... without asking for attention or rewards for doing so. I'm not sure why women shouldn't be encouraged to do the same - these are imo objectively good properties of a successful human being, regardless of gender.

<comment><USER14> >"Not doing anything about it at the time"

For starters, were you there when the events were taking place?

<comment><USER66> good point. i just assume this based on the moaning happening after the fact...

<comment><USER14> Why do you use the word "moaning"?

<comment><USER66> > Ellis recognized that the proper channels were stacked against her, clearly.

My experience makes this very hard to believe. If that is the case then that should be the topic of complaint, not the individual's actions, and especially in a way so lacking in context and detail.

In the context of the workplace this sort of behaviour is bad, not just for the individual, but for the company. I find it very hard to believe that Google would do nothing about it. of course this is just belief. If they are willing to act in support of this kind of inappropriate behaviour then the company should quite rightly get a slamming for it...

Part of modern society is not taking the law into your own hands, whether that is giving someone a whack for being a jerk, or making a big public stink about it. I find it very hard to see this as being any better than punching someone in the face because you don't like their attitude.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Byte FLIGHT How an exodus of tech workers could reshape Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21277254/tech-silicon-valley-remote-work-exodus-facebook-google-coronavirus-future <comment><AUTHOR> Crying shame these people never appreciate San Francisco. Tourists.</comment>


Ask HN: Community's take on Play and Scala: worth learning? - <AUTHOR>

I was recently presented with the opportunity to start a new project that must use the Play web framework (written in Scala). The team behind the project is OK with the fact that I have not used them previously, so this is an opportunity to learn something new. I'm quick to learn and I've used many frameworks before (web and others) so adapting is not an issue. PHP is my strong now (Symfony) and I don't really like Java (this opinion is out of question's scope - no offense to Java coders).<p>What is the community's opinion on Play & Scala? What do experienced coders in this framework have to say about it? Is it worth learning? Thanks for your thoughts all! <comment><USER2> Scala is an interesting language -- It's big - there are a lot of concepts, and on first glance, I didn't particularly like it because it wasn't very opinionated - there are 5 different ways to do anything, and no real indication on which one is "right".

For me, taking Martin Odersky's Coursera class made the language "click" for me. That is, Odersky invented the language to express a particular way of thinking about problems and breaking them into components. The "other" ways of doing things are side effects of this, but there's a definite thought process that Scala facilitates that is a bit unnatural, or at least unintuitive in other languages. It's worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learning a new language is always a good thing.

Even if you never use it, you'll be exposed to different ways of thinking, methodologies, and that what you've learned will be relevant to programming in general.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, both Scala and Play are great.</comment>


Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/0222/Bloom-Box-What-is-it-and-how-does-it-work <comment><USER2> From the linked article:

> _It's a collection of fuel cells – skinny batteries – that use oxygen and > fuel to create electricity with no emissions.

Fuel cells are the building blocks of the Bloom Box. They're made of sand that is baked into diskette-sized ceramic squares and painted with green and black ink. Each fuel cell has the potential to power one light bulb. The fuel cells are stacked into brick-sized towers sandwiched with metal alloy plates.

The fuel cell stacks are housed in a refrigerator-sized unit – the Bloom Box. Oxygen is drawn into one side of the unit, and fuel (fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) is fed into the other side. The two combine within the cell and produce a chemical reaction that creates energy with no burning, no combustion, and no power lines._

So you feed in fuel and oxygen and it outputs electricity. Wow!?!

How do they get away with claiming there are no emissions if you're using fossil fuel to power it? As presented here it smacks of fraud.

<comment><USER3> probably not fraud, just a stupid reporter. from this and the other article it's pretty clear that this is some kind of catalysed oxidation. it's effectively "burning" the fuel in a way that efficiently generates electricity, which is neat, but means that carbon dioxide will be one of the byproducts (and this was mentioned in the earlier article). so that part of the article ("no emissions") is simply wrong (note that it's not a direct quote - it's background from the journalist, who was probably copying from info on a hydrogen fuel cell, not understanding that hydro _carbon_ fuelled cells burn carbon and so generate carbon dioxide).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Horribly bad reporting. Again, the "no emissions" claim, a claim that seems to originate entirely in the mind of the reporters, because Boom is not making this claim. "Low emissions" yes. All fuel cells produce emissions. Just less than combustion for the same energy output.

</comment><comment><USER5> It almost feels like it should be a hoax. The Bloom Box appears to be genius and has massive funding and backing, but the web site is so cryptic and it has come out of no where, I keep thinking someone is going to say "gotcha" at any moment.

<comment><USER6> That's my default position on something like this. I'm waiting for someone who knows what they're talking about to say "yeah, this does what it says on the tin."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In what way is this better than or different from micro-CHP (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power>)?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is about as fact-free as the original TV puff piece. The slashdot discussion yesterday produced more informative comments; e.g. this one is worth reading: [http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1559256&cid...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1559256&cid=31236992)</comment>


Immigration to US to be halted due to virus – Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52363852 <comment><USER2> If Trump is talking about immigration and work visas alike, I simply can't imagine how large parts of the American economy is going to function without foreign workers.

For one, no labor could be hired to perform many farm duties, and certainly not for the amount that farms pay foreign temp workers.

Similarly, Silicon Valley is also hugely dependent. Indeed, if firms could hire locally, they won't jump through the extra hoops to secure work visas - yet we see so many folks on work visas all across the tech industry.

Last, investor visas also inject a sizable amount of capital into the US capital markets and pulling the plug on that when many businesses can't access capital just doesn't make any sense. Most of these people do not even need to work anyway.

I am afraid this is going to accomplish precisely the opposite of what he set out to do.

<comment><USER3> "For one, no labor could be hired to perform many farm duties, and certainly not for the amount that farms pay foreign temp workers."

The opportunity is definitely there to roboticize the backbreaking work those faceless poorly dressed "peasants" are subject to under the watchful gaze of new bossman from investor capitalized Communist Party China. Isreali robotics firms have demo proofs of concepts years ago. Even Elon Musk has posted YouTube clips of potato size sorting machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> If this was feasible it would have happened already. I don't think we're there yet. And how many years are we not to have veggies, fruits any other items that come directly from the labor of immigrants? And Americans won't do this type of work, even if paid better I think

<comment><USER4> That sounds a lot like picking cotton. If the immigrants don't become Americans (who supposedly "won't do this type of work") then what are they? It sounds an awful lot like keeping slaves. They even arrive crammed in the holds of ships, unable to speak the local language.

Americans will do the work. They won't if an excess of unskilled labor drives down the wages, but that doesn't have to happen. We don't need to keep an underclass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> dupe.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931290)</comment>


New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/new-supercomputer-is-a-rack-of-playstations/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html?page=fullpage <comment><USER2> The PlayStation3 has gigabit Ethernet, which is ideal for multi-tier servers. However, the PlayStation3 only has 512MB RAM. Regardless, it may be useful for many computationally intensive tasks:

The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for high- performance computing. Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3, and sells PS3s with Linux pre-installed, in single units, and 6 and 32 node clusters. In addition, RapidMind is pushing their stream programming package for the PS3. Also, on January 3, 2007, Dr. Frank Mueller, Associate Professor of Computer Science at NCSU, clustered 8 PS3s. Mueller commented that the 512 MB of system RAM is a limitation for this particular application, and is considering attempting to retrofit more RAM. -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3>

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy...when I was working at my last job (a financial software startup), I joked to my boss that we should port our software to the PS3's GPU and run a cluster of PlayStations. The math in quantitative finance is rather similar to the sort of massively-parallelizable vector calculations in computer graphics. Plus, I had this amusing image of hedge fund managers slaving away at their Dell workstations while the PlayStations were all locked in the server room, crunching numbers.

I'm impressed that someone actually did it, which goes to show that there's no idea too crazy to implement.

<comment><USER4> Hampster powered workstations... I'm not sure if it would be a disaster for productivity because they're cute or because their poop stinks, and to power a workstation the problem would be multiplied to the 2nd or 3rd power.

I'm sure someone could implement it, but I'm not sure how wise it would be... maybe a PetSmart could do it first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Calling 16 PS3s a supercomputer is a bit of a stretch. The article doesnt quote any numbers either. Cell with 8 SPEs can do about 200 Gflops SP matrix multiply. So I assume PS3 can do about 150 Gflops. 16*150=2400 gflops single precision .. not a supercomputer by todays standards i would say.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious - where did you get that 200 Gflops number from? Is that theoretical, or actual for large values (say 10k) of N?

<comment><USER5> Thats from a paper called "Potential of Cell processor for scientific computing" .. they quote a figure of 200 gigaflops for single precision GEMM (generalized matrix multiply) for large square matrices (using a simulator?). Assuming their model is very accurate, its actual 200 gflops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't it be easier to use "full" Cell processors? Are they much more expensive than PS3s? I assume IBM sells other computers with Cell chip?

How do cell chips compare with modern graphic cards, I think they can be abused to do a similar thing?

<comment><USER8> According to [http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDis...](http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?categoryId=4611686018425192155&storeId=1&catalogId=-840&langId=-1) a blade with two cell chips costs $10k. Two PS3s come in quite a bit cheaper than that. Okay, so they don't have as fast an interconnect and as much RAM, but it depends on your problem whether that matters at all.

Modern graphics cards are also useful for number-crunching, but it's pretty awkward to develop general-purpose code for them. Not that the Cell is all that easy to code for with its SPE-local SRAM and explicit DMAs for memory access. As far as I can tell, though, the Cell development tools are more mature, and it wins in terms of FLOPS-per-watt. I suspect the real win for the Cell is that its interconnect latency is tiny compared to your average GPU, which is great for clustering.

The thing that's killing mainstream adoption for both options in the HPC sector is lack of double-precision (64-bit) floating-point support. There's a version of Cell on its way that fixes that problem, however.

Note: I've not written code for the Cell myself, although I have for GPUs.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> sounds like a business venture</comment>


Ask HN: Online backup without forgot password functionality? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of an online backup service that does not have the typical "forgot password" functionality? (i.e. sending a new password to your email address)
I'd hate to see my files stolen if someone can hack into my email address. Email really is the weak link in our online security.
Instead, it should use some other methods of verification, be it cc verification, telephone verification, etc etc.
I guess you can call me a little paranoid :) <comment><USER2> But if the backupsets themselves are encrypted?

One of the neat features of RMAN in Oracle 11g is it can stream AES256 encrypted backups directly into Amazon S3 as easily as it can do tape. Online- backup is a prime-time technology now.</comment>


Battlecode 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.battlecode.org/ <comment><USER2> Are there any ongoing tournaments for this or similar? I'd love to get involved, but I feel like I wouldn't get the most benefit from this by starting from scratch so late in the game.

<comment><USER3> For Battlecode it's not too late to start. Plenty of people are still getting started. The competition lasts until January 30th and it's only the 4th day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why Java only?

<comment><USER5> Since computation is measured by bytecode cost of instructions, supporting other languages would require a great deal of effort to do similar bytecode counting and to make sure that the counting across languages is fair and balanced. They've considered doing other forms of computation measurement, but none of the alternatives are very good or deterministic (time, lower-level instruction counting, etc).</comment></comment>


Hotmail uses Apache, and PHP, and UNIX !! - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/lvMey.png

<comment><USER2> They originally started on solaris and freebsd. It was a big deal when microsoft bought them and had a hell of a time moving them to windows. At the time IIS was more than a little immature for that sort of scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks totally like a fake :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> not fake !!</comment></comment>