That is great HN content!

Debugging deep down the rabbit hole, until you find a bug in the NIC EEPROM - and the disbelief many show when hearing a software message can bring down a NIC.

I for one would enjoy reading more content like this on HN that what qualifies as best as a friday-night hack

The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom.

Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.

The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.

The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.

At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.

Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.

So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.

Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.

I hate these kinds of articles because they can put tremendous pressure on people. There isn't a "right" way to spend your twenties (or thirties, or any decade) and comparing yourself to Einstein and Newton and Kepler like this article does is worse than counterproductive. The only way you should concern yourself with living is to try to be happy every day, whatever that means to you. Listening to pundits showing you charts and graphs and science about how you're wasting your life will just invite stress and pressure.

I worked on Chrome for most of its life. The internal bug tracker was closed when the product went public (we manually migrated some bugs we were actively working on, and the rest got comments of the form "if you really want this fixed, we're sorry to say that you need to refile it on the public tracker"). The real truth is sadder: many bugs are lost, much like yours.

In the old days I (and a few friends) personally reviewed every bug marked "Linux" and we attempted to triage them, but at one point I realized bugs were filed faster than we could classify or fix them. That isn't saying new bugs were being introduced rapidly, but rather that there's a lot of random spam ("my site doesn't work" / "does it work in other browsers?" / "no") and not-yet-implemented feature requests that appear to users as bugs.

The latest bug on the public tracker is bug number 174163. Chrome was released in late 2008, so let's round up and say the tracker's been up for five years. That's averaging nearly 35k bugs a year, or 95 a day, and in reality the rate was slower in the early years so it's much faster than that now. Even just reading each bug and understanding whether it's reporting an actual issue takes hours.

I have come to believe that a publicly writable bug tracker is a bad idea. Something like what SQLite does (where once users must first establish via some other mechanism they know how to file useful bugs -- yours look good at a glance, but I'd recommend attaching the demo html to the tracker so the link doesn't eventually 404) likely makes a lot of people mad but at least they're not shouting into a vacuum.

Recently (like in the last few months) I heard they've allocated more resources to looking at the tracker, so maybe things will improve. It's honestly just a hard problem.