100% Agreed. Ex-Mesosphere employee (I joined in 2015 and left/was fired a year later)
The dominant ethos at Mesosphere was that they already won, and were poised to become the next 'cloud orchestration' above the cloud services. But the managers also had no empathy for developer experience -- the majority opinion was "distributed systems are hard, developers don't deserve to have a good experience", despite the new cool easy-to-use distributed systems cropping up every week. The company even developed a sham 'community edition' that was designed to fail. One person complained on our community slack channel that he left his cluster running overnight and was charged $600 for the 12 hours of use.
Within a few months of joining, I started to point out their odd technical decisions (e.g. why they decided to build their enterprise edition on Core OS rather than a trustworthy distro), and was eventually chopped for speaking up. I was fired right before a massive company offsite. When the rest of my team came back, they along with my manager were fired, too. The messsage was: we didn't need your whole team but because you spoke up we had to double screw you.
That’s cool! The issue is that when you’re selling to a massive legacy institution, the infosec on a new Linux distro that self updates to new patches is really no bueno. We lost many months on this piece and on key deals. I heard from the grapevine that they ended up having to port DCOS to Ubuntu after all, soon after I left.
Yeah we disabled the auto updates and orchestrated the updates ourselves. Saved our bacon multiple times when kernel/systemd/docker bugs got pushed out.
The dominant ethos at Mesosphere was that they already won, and were poised to become the next 'cloud orchestration' above the cloud services. But the managers also had no empathy for developer experience -- the majority opinion was "distributed systems are hard, developers don't deserve to have a good experience", despite the new cool easy-to-use distributed systems cropping up every week. The company even developed a sham 'community edition' that was designed to fail. One person complained on our community slack channel that he left his cluster running overnight and was charged $600 for the 12 hours of use.
Within a few months of joining, I started to point out their odd technical decisions (e.g. why they decided to build their enterprise edition on Core OS rather than a trustworthy distro), and was eventually chopped for speaking up. I was fired right before a massive company offsite. When the rest of my team came back, they along with my manager were fired, too. The messsage was: we didn't need your whole team but because you spoke up we had to double screw you.