I know it’s April already, but happy new year everyone!
For those not in the know, I got a somewhat unexpected new job prospect (and offer, which I accepted) at the end of 2012. Since then, I’ve been a senior member of the technical operations team at TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel site, with over 100 million reviews, and over 100 million unique users per month. For people keeping track, this is the third company I worked for during the year 2012, and all three have been mentioned on The Office (Linden Lab [Second Life], Harmonix [Guitar Hero / Rock Band], and now Tripadvisor [check out the Schrute Farms episode]). However, it’s not just popularity or “hipness” that led me to shift around.
I like to tell people (and recruiters) that I have four rules for picking a place to work:
- Must not be generally evil or tending towards evil (in my opinion) — This rules out most banks or the pharmaceutical industry, any petrochemical comany, and probably currently most of Google and Facebook.
- Must be a profitable venture — I’m too old to play the startup risk game.
- Must be accessible to my apartment in Boston via public transportation commute of <30 minutes — I don’t own a car, don’t want one, and I’m not moving anywhere.
- Operations and Systems must be critical to the core business and of the highest priority — My job is best executed when it has the highest respect and attention of the company and management (immediate as well as upper).
It was that last one that I forgot about when I ended up at Harmonix. After being at Linden for 4+ years, I could feel myself falling into the crotchety grizzled BOFH sysadmin role. Come to think of it, that probably happens to anyone in my field after a few years in an organization. Spending a year at Harmonix was a great chance to broaden my horizons, relax, and experience new perspectives on things. As I stated in an earlier blog post, I loved working there, and I do miss the place, people, and incredibly fun things happening in their awesome Central Square office. At TripAdvisor, we’re still in the business of providing joy to people. Rather than by selling some of the best video games, this time it’s by helping folks plan and take vacations.
Very similar to my time at Linden Lab, when I told people that I worked at Harmonix (makers of Rock Band and Dance Central franchises) the first response was usually “wow that’s really cool.” However, the second response was more often than not, “are they still relevant? What are they working on now?” While it’s true that the heyday of plastic instruments (and maybe console gaming in general — according to some naysayers) has passed, I’m still rooting for the folks over there, and I happen to know that they are still a vital, awesome independent studio with the best people and some blow-your-mind projects in the pipeline. If I was still there, I’d be hustling along side them doing my best to keep up and push forward the state of game network interaction and back ends. That being said, the effort that game developers (particularly independents) put into network features, operations, and backends is decreasing over time. And it should be. Great games are great because of the focus on art, gameplay, story, and other intangibles. Console manufacturers and third-party contractors can be brought on to do the job now of multi-player matchmaking and scoreboard databases, letting game makers stick to making awesome games and fostering and maintaining player communities — both things that Harmonix has done and will continue to do very well.
What drew me out to TripAdvisor (other than the folks I already know who work there — hi Laura and Drew!) was the scale. Honestly, I missed the excitement and challenges of running a huge infrastructure. At its peak, Second Life consisted of three data centers, 12,000+ servers, and received a new rack of 40 servers or so every couple of weeks. TripAdvisor isn’t quite that big infrastructure-wise (although we have 5 times as many employees), but we serve 2 billion ads a year, and are peaking at 600k web requests per minute (and growing tremendously still year-over-year). The company has a weekly release cycle, an innovative and freewheeling engineering culture, and an unofficial motto of “speed wins.”
At first, being a somewhat methodical systems engineer, the concept of putting velocity in front of “correctness” scared me a little bit. I’ve focused on things like proper cabling, thorough documentation, long planning cycles, enforcing automation prior to production, eliminating waste, etc. Here, though, I quickly learned that it’s important to keep moving and to cut a little slack to the folks that came before me for bad cabling, some missing documentation, or leaving a half dozen underutilized or unused servers around (sometimes literally powered-off in the racks or on the floor) while buying new ones in a hurry. If everyone takes the extra time (myself included) to do things the absolute correct way, we’ll lose our competitive advantage and then I’d be out of a job. So yeah, speed does win.
At this point, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer you all potential jobs here. So, visit TripAdvisor Careers, find something you want to do, and drop me a line if I know you — I’d love to give a few hiring referrals, and yes we are hiring like crazy as the company expands!
Into The Weeds 