[jmwilson]

Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.

[hondo77]

I worked at Disney Animation during the 90s. Yeah, my career may have peaked 30 years ago but not everyone gets a peak like that. "A gift" is the best way to describe it.

[cryptonector]

Even working at Sun during the 00s, when it was declining, was a gift. I know; I was there.

[sys_64738]

Agreed. I was there also and can say I've never been so invested in a single company. Sun was the best company I ever worked for.

[markus_zhang]

I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a sophomore.

I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is bad and docs was just Lyon's book.

Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start. Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and AI.

[loas]

Was he very skilled back then when he did it?

Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging his own head against the wall many times while dealing with mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very skilled?

I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys such as these to become great and skilled seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all regret it.

[parrit]

I wonder what stopped me being at that level. Mostly attitude, fear and perhaps aptitude. I liked things that were easy to install and follow tutorials. I got into Visual C++ as it actually installed as opposed to a magazine cover Linux distributionn that barely run. I think having the main system (gotta get those grades) takes most of the energy for most people. Either those who are happy to drop out or genius enough to both study and hack survive to do really cool stuff.

[TMWNN]

>I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a sophomore.

And which formed the basis of a full-fledged commercial product sold by Amdahl, a big-name company selling big iron to big-name customers.

[commandersaki]

Yeah, in my 40s, but I always daydream about having a job at early Sun, DEC, or Cisco.