I went to see Mesos early in their life in their San Francisco office after a joint customer put us in touch.
Never in my life did I meet such an arrogant group of people.
First, they left us waiting in reception for an hour.
They eventually took the meeting over lunch, where we had to watch them inhaling their free food.
Some guy in plastic-leather trousers spent most of the hour lecturing us about all of the multi million deals they were doing, and how they weren't interested in speaking with anyone who couldn't write 7 figure checks.
Not once did they ask about our business or even our names if I remember correctly.
I had a similar experience with other west coast tech companies. Too arrogant for their own good and not able to put in the hard yards with stodgy old enterprise companies even when they have good technology and are early to market.
I haven't seen much overt rudeness like what you're describing, but it does mystify me how often I'll meet with another company to discuss a potential integration story that benefits us both, and instead of any engineers who can discuss technical considerations, they send multiple product managers who all want to present their own slide deck about why they're so great.
I know you're great - that's why we requested this meeting. I think we're great too. There's a reason I think our integration would be a win-win and a win for users. Can we actually talk about it now? Oh let's schedule another meeting so the fourth product manager who didn't show up for this one can share their slide deck too.
I couldn’t stop crying-laughing at what you described.
Unfortunately at many firms, Product is supposed to be the interface to customers and engineers are supposed to interface with product. This model only works if the product person is smart and humble enough to understand when to involve engineers. Often their incentives are against it as they want the credit for “landing” a big account without the helps of others, especially engineers who often report to a different org.
True. As the major corporate sponsor though they didn’t give it the best chance.
I ran one of the first Docker partners and saw first hand how both Mesos and Docker Inc had considerable mindset and interest from large enterprises for a year or so before Kubernetes matured.
They both spectacularly failed to deliver through arrogance and bad execution.
I remember visiting SFBA in 2014 or so, a friend worked in PayPal said they used mesos, kubernetes was a baby project with a lot of hype. It sure seemed mesos had won back then, and the fact that kubernetes caught up, surpassed and then succeeded so wildly would have never crossed my mind.
I worked with tech companies and some banks in the early days of Kubernetes who were deep in Mesos and many of them felt the same way. It’s really hard to see this as it’s happening.
Kubernetes is absolutely “worse is better” when it comes to scheduling. But scheduling isn’t the problem most people needed solved. Kubernetes standardized deployment patterns of multiple apps well for most people. Everything else was a nice to have (scheduling, scale, ease of initial setup, etc).
> I had a similar experience with other west coast tech companies.
I am the infra lead for a "west coast tech company", and they gave us the same guff. I knew we would not be using them after the first few minutes of listening to them.
But please do continue to hate on this coast, tell your friends. I don't want to compete with more folks for housing.
I understand how Parent’s “west coast company” tag can come off as snotty, but I’ve begun using “west coast” and “east coast” as non-pejorative shorthand when discussing with a mixed audience the two major distinct and incompatible corporate operating systems in the tech industry.
The coastal definition is obviously imprecise, e.g. HP, based in Palo Alto, is as much an “east coast company” as IBM and JPMorgan Chase in New York, however it gets the point across more effectively and non-pejoratively IMO than enterprise vs startup, old school vs new school, companies who run on VMware vs k8s companies, oracle-y or Googley, boomer company vs hipster company, etc. I’ve found every person you’re talking to, whether they’re a developer, salesperson, HR recruiter, investor, etc. immediately knows what you’re taking about in context.
Long response but I had previously been thinking about this and appreciate to hear others’ thoughts.
I interviewed 3 different engineers from Mesosphere in 2015 or so at a time when it seemed like the company was tanking and everyone was looking for a new job. At least for the people I interviewed, there was nothing to be arrogant about. We were specifically looking for engineers with this sort of experience and none of them were close to getting an offer.
Never in my life did I meet such an arrogant group of people.
First, they left us waiting in reception for an hour.
They eventually took the meeting over lunch, where we had to watch them inhaling their free food.
Some guy in plastic-leather trousers spent most of the hour lecturing us about all of the multi million deals they were doing, and how they weren't interested in speaking with anyone who couldn't write 7 figure checks.
Not once did they ask about our business or even our names if I remember correctly.
I had a similar experience with other west coast tech companies. Too arrogant for their own good and not able to put in the hard yards with stodgy old enterprise companies even when they have good technology and are early to market.