Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I worked in Nokia Research and Nokia Maps around the time that Apple started kicking their ass. Platforms became a dirty word in that company. Equating that to devops is a mistake. Any kind of platform is a problem.

What's a platform: anything that only serves internal customers that is treated like a product but just isn't.

Nokia had lots of platforms. Several Linux based operating systems (meego/maemo, meltemi, and briefly Android even), several flavors of Symbian (S60, S80, S90), and several flavors of non symbian legacy proprietary platforms (S30 and S40). And that's just operating systems. And that was before MS got involved and added two flavors of Windows Phone with completely different kernels. Nokia also had UI platforms (multiple). And it dabbled with online/cloud platforms as well (OVI, if you remember that).

And indeed devops and operations platforms. I witnessed what the introduction of AWS did to those. It was hilarious. First Nokia IT was outraged that people dared to use something from Amazon, then shocked it was actually cheaper and better, and then the layoffs started and that team was one of the first things that got impacted for the obvious reason that the AWS deployment was a raging success and they tried blocking that for several years at great cost to the business. Once they were off the critical path to deploying stuff, that whole unit became redundant. They had forgotten about end users and they were pissing off their internal customers to the point that those started engineering around them.

That's the problem with internal platforms: they compete with external ones and if they aren't good enough, they become a problem. You get people digging in, add internal politics to the mix, and now you have epic amounts of money being wasted.

I think Google and Facebook are good examples of becoming serial offenders on being too absorbed by their own internal platform teams. I recognize a lot of Nokia in modern day Google. Lots of headless chickens in their leadership, endless waffle about internal platforms that then flop (fuchsia being a prime example), endless reinvention of wheels (UI frameworks, compilers, operating systems, chat protocols, social networking, IOT, LLM/AI, etc.) and a long list of stuff that they discontinue because it just didn't work, and way too many variants of just about anything they do.

I remember my first day working at Nokia in Ruoholahti, I was on the build engineering team and my boss didn't arrive until 12. (I arrived at 8am).

I was outraged, but informed that he had done the "Herculean task" of getting Nokia IT/Security to open two firewall ports, and it had taken 10 working days of negotiations (including the weekend, and up to 3am the (Sunday) night before my first day).

I was a little taken aback by how difficult everyone made it seem, as he really was well regarded for having managed to do it in such a short amount of time.

Before I moved to Berlin, I worked out of the Ruoholahti office as well (2005-2009) while in Nokia research. The same building had a lot of the maemo people as well. Fun place to be at the time.

I walked past there a few months ago when I visited Helsinki. Huawei has an office there now. And their presence there is not some coincidence. They were hiring a lot of Nokia people during and after the Nokia implosion. Probably lots of people in that building are former colleagues that also worked there while I was there.

After I moved to Berlin, firewall ports were indeed a big part of the ongoing frustrations with getting shit done via Nokia IT. Of course, those issues got escalated via several layers of management and then resolved anyway. Part of the friction here was that the maps unit was basically something that came into being via several acquisitions. So, there were a lot of new people trying to get shit done being blocked by silly issues like this that lost patience with all that pretty quickly.

Most of these Herculean efforts involved lots of non technical people from both sides having to have meetings with each other about a firewall rule until finally somebody high enough up the ladder inevitably told them to just "open the ffing port already and stop wasting my time" and forced the issue that way. I'm not paraphrasing here, I'm pretty sure that was a literal quote from a meeting; I know some people that got dragged into those meetings regularly.

Anyway, enough egos were bruised and solutions were found that didn't involve having Nokia IT on the critical part to anything important. Which is how AWS happened. That went from "WTF? Can they even do that?!" to "well, that actually happened" to "Oh wait this is so much less painful! Cheaper too." in the span of a few months. There was no way that Nokia IT was going to be allowed to get back on the critical path to anything.

That's a very interesting story, can't find those in places other than HN, thanks for sharing. Out of interest, what was the reason they didn't start rebuilding their stack on top of AWS? If it was cheaper and better, then it would make sense for them to effectively migrate all teams to their AWS-plus solution? Was there some anti-cloud sentiment?

By that point they were redundant and no longer needed. And they were defensive about their internal stuff. Which of course included lots of hardware, software, network connections spanning the globe, teams that maintained various bits of software, and supported by a lot of bureaucracy, etc. All of that was replaced with AWS. That process went way to quickly for them to adapt. By the time they started complaining to management about being bypassed, the whole thing was basically a done deal.

This kind of thing is highly disruptive to internal teams. Basically it starts with them being all the undisputed kings of their territory and then somebody going first principles on all of that and bypassing it completely.

It's of course a complex story that involves multiple acquisitions and the acquired companies basically ignoring the internal stuff so they could actually get stuff done against all the silly internal bureaucracy, lack of flexibility, and internally focused & detached from reality management (many of whom were clear examples of the Peter principle).

Once one team launched on AWS, things spread relatively. The managers associated with the project got some nice bonuses/promotions and incentives to do more.

Coming back to the Google analogy here, I imagine a lot of this is playing out in the Flutter and Fuchsia teams currently. Google has flutter and non flutter UI products. And it pretty much stopped pretending Fuchsia has a future in any of it's products or internal server platforms. Correct me if I'm wrong. Just my impression.

MS is a good example that slowly got over its internal platforms after Ballmer left. If you look at a lot of their recent stuff, it's a lot less about their internal platforms and legacy and a lot more about Linux, OSS, browser standards (they killed IE even), non .Net languages like python and typescript (which they created even), etc. That's a long journey from pretending the web was going to run on IE with things like vb script, xaml, and all the other failed stuff they pushed twenty years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com