Jay bonci problem interview

Problem Interview w/ Jay Bonci - Engineering Manager @ Akamai Technologies

Job Title: Engineering Manager

Company: Akamai Technologies

Company size: 5,000

In-house developers: group: 18 devs; company: 2,000 global

In-house open-source devs: 100% use OSS

Open-source projects used: "A f*cking ton. Browsers, Ruby, Python, Perl, PhantomJS, Selenium, Jenkins, etc."

Budget for open-source: near 0; old license

How do you decide to buy open-source software?

• We ask “Is it cheaper to buy support or build expertise in-house?” Almost always cheaper and easier to manage risk to build expertise in-house
• Buy derivative open-source like XWindows on one-off basis

Do you use open-source on projects with tight, frequent deadlines: Yes, all the time; non-Oracle DBMS, 250,000 linux servers; manage by looking into it but not modifying it because it incurs maintenance cost

Problem ranking:

• Never worth modifying a language/platform; certain complexity means OSS is a cost product; CPAN module? no problem - fix it ourselves, upstream acceptance is great ** prefer hack-around to bug-fixes almost always
• Bugs almost never prevent timeliness of release; can't remember time when OSS bug jammed a release

Other problems:

• Constant need for churn w/ security fixes combined with custom fixes
• Inconsistent release structures & bad dependency management; CPAN hell
• Stuck on end-of-life versions
• Have to test backwards compatibility

quick codesy.io feedback

attach it to GitHub issues

• "I have an issue; file github issue, and I'm willing to throw in $200 to finish by certain date" or graduated timeline $200/1 week, $100/week

• yes - ping-back for prototype when it's live [email protected]

Scoring (http://leananalyticsbook.com/scoring-problem-interviews/):

1. 10 points
2. 5 points
3. 8 points
4. 0 points (forgot to ask)
5. 4 points

Total: 27 points