I'm sure Zach is a brilliant guy but it's not a very good slide deck.
He lists "nosql" as a technology that it's easier to use outside of the big-company matrix. There is no such thing as "nosql". There are various databases. There is the relational database which solves its problem excellently and whose limitations are well-known and sometimes very painful, especially when dealing with huge amounts (multi-node) of data. There are other data models with different trade-offs. There is no such thing as "nosql". It is not a technology or skill or anything else. There's Cassandra and MongoDB and Redis and various others, but there isn't a "NoSQL". I can't type "nosql start" at the command line and get anything useful to happen.
Sorry, I had to do that.
Also, Zach works at Github and I've heard that it's an amazing place. Great! I'm glad he works for the rare good company and hasn't lost his passion. I hope he never does. Still, I don't think he knows what VC-istan startups are like for most engineers. He works in a company that (from what I'm hearing) is successful enough that it can stay in Real Technology and keep the work interesting.
For most, VC-istan is not "a great industry, even without the millions". The millions are the goddamn fucking point. The millions determine who gets to be CEO and CTO and call the shots, and what shots are called. The millions determine which projects the company can afford and which are nice-to-haves and which are ignored. The millions are why people will sacrifice their 20s to implement the lame idea of some well-connected guy who went to boarding school with the VCs.
If you're Working For Money, which most people are, and you're not making some... you're doing things wrong. This is not a judgment; I think most of us will make a bad call at least once.
He's in Real Technology, and bless him, but that makes him biased. He works in a good company and so he gets interesting work, so he's happy even if he's not a millionaire. That's a different thing. If you work in social media startups and answer to non-technical managers and don't make "fuck-you money" within 10 years then, guess what, you lost.
Even worse, he lists "brainfuck" as a technology that's easier to use outside of the big-company matrix. There is no such thing as "brainfuck". There are various dialects and derivative languages. There is the object-oriented programming language which solves its problem excellently and whose limitations are well-known and sometimes very painful, especially when dealing with huge amounts (multi-node) of data. There are other models of computation with different trade-offs. There is no such thing as "brainfuck". It is not a technology or skill or anything else. There's Toadskin and Smallfuck and Doublefuck and various others, but there isn't a "BrainFuck". I can't type "brainfuck start" at the command line and get anything useful to happen.
The concept of "brainfuck" is one that is constructive, whereas "nosql" is deconstructive: one defines something from nothing, and the other defines something only by what it isn't. When you look at the ecosystem of NoSQL solutions, you don't really find much commonality... there are patterns, but they are largely defined by prototypical examples that are insanely disparate (BigTable, Dynamo, memcached). Your past experience working with HBase (other than in the general "problem solving skills transfer" way) doesn't help one later work with fundamentally different systems like Riak.
Your sarcasm thereby definitely hits the exact statement made, but seems to entirely miss the underlying point: you are correct that even for SQL you have to use a concrete implementation, not the abstract concept, but to an important extent which database you end up using doesn't really matter... they are all pretty much the same (and yes, this is coming from someone who in different contexts will implore people to not judge "SQL" poorly due to problems inherent in "MySQL"). That is just not true of "NoSQL": if you want to be a little more honest in the comparison, you could try something like "not-Java" (which one also imagines is difficult to use inside of a big-company matrix).
He lists "nosql" as a technology that it's easier to use outside of the big-company matrix. There is no such thing as "nosql". There are various databases. There is the relational database which solves its problem excellently and whose limitations are well-known and sometimes very painful, especially when dealing with huge amounts (multi-node) of data. There are other data models with different trade-offs. There is no such thing as "nosql". It is not a technology or skill or anything else. There's Cassandra and MongoDB and Redis and various others, but there isn't a "NoSQL". I can't type "nosql start" at the command line and get anything useful to happen.
Sorry, I had to do that.
Also, Zach works at Github and I've heard that it's an amazing place. Great! I'm glad he works for the rare good company and hasn't lost his passion. I hope he never does. Still, I don't think he knows what VC-istan startups are like for most engineers. He works in a company that (from what I'm hearing) is successful enough that it can stay in Real Technology and keep the work interesting.
For most, VC-istan is not "a great industry, even without the millions". The millions are the goddamn fucking point. The millions determine who gets to be CEO and CTO and call the shots, and what shots are called. The millions determine which projects the company can afford and which are nice-to-haves and which are ignored. The millions are why people will sacrifice their 20s to implement the lame idea of some well-connected guy who went to boarding school with the VCs.
If you're Working For Money, which most people are, and you're not making some... you're doing things wrong. This is not a judgment; I think most of us will make a bad call at least once.
He's in Real Technology, and bless him, but that makes him biased. He works in a good company and so he gets interesting work, so he's happy even if he's not a millionaire. That's a different thing. If you work in social media startups and answer to non-technical managers and don't make "fuck-you money" within 10 years then, guess what, you lost.
If Only I Knew That Shit Before I Was Almost 30.