marcusf

Random, horrendous and indiscriminate killing!

[/joke]

Egan is always dense. It's some mind bending physics/comp sci, but all cooked up in his brain so doesn't really apply to anything productive. I struggled with his books and his writing but toughened it out because I liked the concepts, but he's divisive.

man, a comment that brings back memories. you and me both.

An extremely layman answer is that most interesting innovation in parsing in relatively modern times has happened seems to be in the context of IDE's. I.e. incremental, high-performance parsing to support syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc. etc.

(I may be talking out of my ass here.)

Parameters and training corpus size matter. Last year a new paper (Google "Chinchilla optimality") focused on compute-optimal LLMs found that we'd been under-training models -- i.e. you could wring more performance out of smaller models by training on more data. But (as far as I understand it - interested layman here) - for a given amount of data, model performance seems to scale more or less linearly with parameters.

Now, we could see another model architecture than the current reigning transformer architecture upend this (much work is ongoing on breaking the quadratic term in the transformer that computationally bounds its performance - an example is the Hyena paper that was published just the other day).

Biggest computer and most data wins is still the paradigm here.

Eric, want to echo what folks are saying here. I stumbled on your blog in high school (ca 2003?) and you (and Raymond Chen) fueled so much of my passion for compilers and API design respectively, which dictated both my school choice and at least some career choices later. You were highly influential from afar :)

Exciting

Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.

Happily we announced Chromecast support today: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/spotify-might-best-new-thing-ne.... Hope you like it!

Caveat that I might be completely off, but if, say, 10 bn people tried once a nanosecond since the inception of the universe, you'd still have only 10^10 * 2^86 ≈ 2^33 * 2^86 = 2^119 attempts, that still only cover's 2^-9 (i.e. 1/512th) of the total addressable 2^128 space, i.e. still fairly unlikely that you'll have hit that specific number.

I think it's a mistake to compare Le Corbusier-style "areas for living" with modern urbanised zones. The big issue there is that – sure – there's highrises, but no urbanisation. Usually because they are either lacking commercial space on ground floors or the density is too low, on aggregate, or the areas are too spaced out to support vibrant commercial centers. Look at stockholm, you have city, greenery, suburb, greenery, suburb. No urban connection, not enough density.

I've lived in areas like this myself, and I agree they're not nice. However, I have to think it's not only locality to city center that makes central areas good, it's also that they are self sustaining burrows. There's ample housing, parks, jobs, retail, restaurants, bars, etc.

Not to discard your comment, but wrt Stockholm: Build higher! Urbanize areas outside of the core inner city. Lots to do in planning and building to not create artificial social policy.

Great to hear. And yeah, Henrik is teaching wizard. I'm sure he'll be happy to hear though :-)

Hey! Thanks for the long question. I'll pass on your regards to Henrik :-)

From what I understand, Spotify squads each focus on one area and each squad has very different members so it can stay autonomous. Is that right? What happens if sysadmin / developer / designer from squad X gets hit by a bus ? I'm actually talking about the bus factor [1] here, I hope you are all well :-)

It's not always easy of course. I think the notion of T/M-shaped people apply. E.g. if only one person in a squad can do iPhone development, better spend time training some of the other people to do it as well. It also creates collaboration opportunities, which are highly important to actually make a team work. Then of course there is a lot of fluidity between squads. If squad X needs design help but are out of a designer, squad Y might lend their assistance.

How often do you change squads ? What about tribes ? The second video mentions "guild unconferences". What is that ? Can squads work remotely ?

It varies. Some people have been in the same squad for two years, others are in new ones every six months. And generally, you change squads and if a tribe move has to happen, that'll happen as part of that. Squads are generally co-located though, so not many squads are remote-composed. A guild unconference is simply an unconference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference) on a certain area, e.g. Machine Learning, Web, Mobile, Backend etc. So all the people who are interested in that get together for a day and debate the future of that area.

How does code review work at Spotify ? For the last 2 weeks, we've been using pull requests on Github, which I've found to be a very good way of doing code review. Since the reviewer is the one to merge, eventually his/her name is on the commit too, which in my case makes me focus even more before hitting the "Merge" button. Merging creates an explicit merge commit, which makes reverting things easy if needed. And discussion in the comments allow for efficient, asynchronous discussion.

We use GitHub as well. Roughly the same model.

The video talks about how important trusting employees is to Spotify. That makes me wonder: do employees sign such things as non disclosure or non compete agreements ? what do you (or what does Spotify) think of such agreement ?

We think trust is highly important, and embodied in what we share internally and how open we generally are. Not sure I can comment on the legal aspects of that though.

For the last few months, I've been reading the Groove blog [2]. Recently, Alex, Groove's CEO, talked about how much time he was spending talking to customers. How much do you (devs, sysadmins, marketers, designers, etc) communicate with users ?

Never enough :-) We do spend a lot of time with user research, both structured via our research team but also Starbucks testing, when a few devs go down to the local coffee shop and test features. Then we have community outreach teams that keep us honest and makes sure to push the customer voice inside the company. Also, a ton of engineers hang around on e.g. /r/reddit and asks questions. And when users blog about or voice their concerns, it does make the round on internal lists.

How do gradual rollouts work ? Do you use a third party service for that ? Would love to learn more.

Mostly custom built, and it varies a bit between the backend and the front end. It's all the usual jazz though, deploying per machine or percentages of users or localized to markets etc.

Thanks again.

Hope I at least answered some of the questions.

Sometimes. But as a general principle, we ship on quality, not time.

That's a good question. I think about it as a way to distinguish from e.g. departments, projects etc and set the connotation that these are different things. If you use them to mean a 1:1 mapping to e.g. projects, then it falls apart. The terms aren't important per se.

In other words – you can't make a race horse by painting a pig brown.

Cool to hear our model is getting adopted. A big difference here is that chapters at Spotify aren't departments, they are usually fairly small (5-10 people), and that squads are long lived, rather than project focused.

Sorry for late answers here but thanks for asking questions!

How does accountability work at Spotify? It looks like your squads have a specific goal (and maybe a leader?) but when you get up to the tribe level it wasn't clear if one person is in charge of a tribe, or if a product, design and tech lead all share authority. If that is true, do you guys not suffer from the tyranny of structurelessness? How do you do strategic planning/coordination?

Squads don't have leaders, but they do have product owners who ultimately owns the roadmap of the product owned by that squad. A tribe is lead by a trio of engineering, product and design. Responsibility for the various facets of the tribes output is divided between the three roles.

How do teams that are not engineering focused get stuff done? For instance a customer support team or marketing team - would it have its own engineers and engineering management?

Yeah, the tech/product side of that have homes in tribes as well.

Edit: finally, how long have you worked at Spotify with this culture?

I've been here 2.5 years. This structure has been in place for roughly three years, maybe a bit more.

I'm subjective, but I think Spotify uses slightly innovative ways of organising. See: * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult... * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-cult...

Happy to answer questions.

Can't disagree with GDrive being awesome. However, I was responding to the parent's suggestion that the parent's parent's quote was negated by e.g. GDrive.

With less double negatives: File syncing has actually turned out to be a pretty big thing, it just took (and this might be a bad list, but off the top of my head) 1. mobile adoption, 2. higher avg bandwidth and 3. someone getting it right. GDrive/Evernote/… does not negate that there is a demand for Dropbox.

Dropbox?

I like the Henrik Kniberg definition of culture, 'culture is the stuff people do without thinking about it'. E.g. you could codify most things as processes (which is basically the entire point of things like value stream maps), but a company culture is infuses the kind of things you don't need to make explicit, because they become self-evident.

Think Netflix travel policy ("be responsible") vs more traditional companies with rules and travel agents for implicit vs explicit, or cultural vs process driven.

What I took offence to was comparing Europe as a whole to America. It doesn't necessarily make sense given the different make-up of the continents.

I have to volt-face that a bit though in that I was a bit surprised at both unemployment rate and labor force participation rates between EU and US. I.e. this graph didn't look like what I was prejudiced to think: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS/countries...

It's crazy listening to US rhetoric about the job market given your relatively low unemployment, high labor force participation and relatively high average salaries.

There's not much point comparing working conditions between Europe and the US when one of these places has widespread unemployment and there is literally rioting on the streets, as was the case not very long ago.

Which continent are you talking about now? Sounds like both?

Stockholm, Sweden, has a fairly unregulated taxi market in that pricing is set independently. This causes massive issues, specifically for tourists who have no idea what to pick. They end up paying $500 USD to go from the airport to town, a ride that is usually closer to $60-70 USD.

I guess what I'm saying is judgement is contextual.

Hey ho! That ending was unnecessarily rude. I don't think he planned his post as a personal attack on you or your values, so I don't think the hostility is necessary.

For some people it's easier than for others. I work with a ton of people who've migrated to Sweden. I think they find 1 and 2 fairly easy -- not trivial, mind you, but not hard enough that they can't be overcome. The third problem varies from person to person and what stage in life they're at. We have many people who have moved here with kids, and it seems to work out well. So it's certainly not unsurmountable, but yes, not easy either.

In the Balkans, you have rich gypsies throwing money on women at their weddings and carrying more bling on them than you will ever have in your lifetime.

From my understanding, the throwing of money during a wedding is a tradition in some cultures. It's either used to pay for the wedding, or the money goes around and is used in another wedding.

I've given money at weddings, in an envelope instead of throwing it, but I wouldn't call that a display of wealth. Not if spending YOUR money on YOUR wedding isn't, at least.

So the pragmatists question is then naturally, how do you teach it? How do you shard the curriculum if not by subject? It seems a bit overbearing to ask each teacher to have the proper renaissance man's education of knowing a bit of everything.

Contrasted with a favourite from Stephen Fry: "An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."

From the story, the author doesn't sound like a developer.