
Walmart Labs: Why we run an open source program - jamesgpearce
http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-walmart-labs/
======
drawkbox
_The community is having a great discussion around “remote work”. You see the
dichotomy of companies such as Slack who build products that happen to enable
better remote communication, but who hire people to co-located buildings.

As soon as you get beyond a few people, you are working “remotely”. If you
aren’t in the same room you will have your main workflow happening through
tooling. Yes, you can get together to meet face to face on topics, but that
isn’t your general workflow._

Never heard such glory come from anything associated with Walmart before.

Remote working is what you do everyday even if you are 'co-located in the same
building', or same company different building. To top it off all your
customers are remote, get your communication and systems in check to also do
remote, it gives an external view like no other on your product, and gives all
your product engineers a lab to work in.

~~~
shanemhansen
I work for Walmart. Remotely. It is glorious. While many of the teams are
Scala and clojure focused, my team does mostly Golang.

~~~
tiler
How could I get in touch with a team within Walmart that uses Scala? (To see
if there are any available positions.)

~~~
shanemhansen
Here's one job post mentioning scala: [http://jobs.walmart.com/silicon-
valley/engineering/jobid6945...](http://jobs.walmart.com/silicon-
valley/engineering/jobid6945617-senior-software-engineer-jobs)

walmart.ca is now running play and scala afaik:
[http://www.nurun.com/en/news/nurun-launches-redesigned-
trans...](http://www.nurun.com/en/news/nurun-launches-redesigned-
transactional-platform-with-walmart-canada/)

------
vezzy-fnord
_The majority of great engineers have GitHub profiles and have been working on
projects there (open source and otherwise). The stack has become ubiquitous,
and the majority of engineers either like it, or are “happy” enough with it.
There are a few grey beards that rant on about Perforce or something else… but
that is pretty rare :)_

The majority of great engineers... in what field? Web development? Probably.
Some language communities are also disproportionately represented. As a whole
though, I can't buy that everyone has been totally assimilated into GitHub.

I also like how everything other than GitHub (not even Git) and Perforce has
just about spontaneously evaporated according to this paragraph.

~~~
codeonfire
I must be in the minority. I am the greatest engineer in all fields, and I
don't use github because my job is not github friendly. I only say I'm the
greatest because, hey, if we are throwing around value judgements about
engineers I'm going to grab me some. Actually, I wish that practice would
stop. Every blogger seems to know who is the greatest, and not surprisingly
it's always themselves and people they know using the same technology as they
are.

~~~
lewisl9029
Personally, I'd rather have employers judge me on code I've written for
projects in my GitHub profile, code that I've meticulously architected and
refined over periods of weeks, months and years, targeted to solve non-
trivial, relevant real-world problems in an elegant and expressive manner,
over some code that I'm forced to spit out on the spot under unrealistic time
constraints solving nerdy CS algorithm puzzles and doing low-level performance
optimizations that's never realistically worthwhile to implement from scratch
in production (at least for the kinds of problem domains I'm interested in).

I do understand the possible misrepresentation resulting from judging
candidates based SOLELY on GitHub profiles, but for those with presentable
contributions/projects readily available on GitHub, I feel it makes for a much
fairer representation of the candidate than the alternative.

~~~
jghn
Me too, and that's why I set up our hiring process such that candidates are
welcomed to supply code samples via github and other means if they can.
However we recognize that this simply isn't feasible for everyone, and it's
not held against anyone if that's how it is.

For me personally, nearly all of the work I've done over the last handful of
years is on github, however most of that is contained in private repos that I
can't share. I don't think that's what people mean when they say that I'm
supposed to have everything on github :)

------
Flux159
I'm not going to comment on who is writing the article because that's not the
point.

I think this is a good article pushing for more open source development at
traditionally large enterprise software companies. It helps the open source
community and it helps the company attract talent. It also gives good advice
to large enterprises saying that they shouldn't just throw their code into
open source without good documentation and community engagement. At the very
least its a good start for companies that would have otherwise kept all their
code internally.

Just because the article mentions Walmart Labs working on hapi (apparently an
express-like nodejs framework) doesn't mean that HN should suddenly disregard
the content of the article (as some of the other comments seem to be doing).

~~~
mathattack
Good points. This can be a good article for people in large companies who need
to justify Open Source efforts.

~~~
bglazer
Yep I plan to post this to my company's intranet social network. My
understanding is that our company's policies prohibit contributing to the open
source projects we use.

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CmonDev
_" The supply doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can
to help attract, and retrain talent."_

Here we go again. Please stop lying! Property supply also doesn't meet demand,
guess what happens to prices? Salaries are static => no major demand.

~~~
tormeh
"The supply [of 10x+ programmers] doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to
do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent."

People who say this kind of thing won't look twice at someone with a bachelor
in Java and C++.

------
asadotzler
Dion's a smart guy and a great communicator and I'm really excited that he's
been pushing hard at Walmart Labs since moving on from Mozilla (and Palm.)

Walmart does things at scale and if they can bring some of that strength to
open source, even just improving business understanding of open source
(ideally a lot more, as Dion expians) that's nothing but solid good for the
world.

------
pargon
Walmart Labs talks about wanting to bring in great engineers, and yet they
make prospective engineers piss in a cup.

Glad they've got their priorities sorted out.

~~~
Stratoscope
Is this true? Walmart Labs was sounding pretty good to me after reading the
rest of this thread, but I would never work for a company that does drug
testing. If anyone has the true story here I'd be interested to hear it.

~~~
freyr
> _but I would never work for a company that does drug testing._

I wouldn't drug test employees, but I can understand why some companies might
be compelled to do so. I have friends who smoke pot recreationally, and
they're fine. I have also had friends/coworkers who became genuinely addicted
to drugs, and very consistently they ended up as ticking time bombs for their
employers. Things didn't end poorly, they ended disastrously. I know that's
not always the case, and that it doesn't justify drug screening everyone, and
that it's an unpopular opinion here. But I've seen enough that I know why some
employers think it's worth it.

~~~
DanBC
But you can use existing workplace protocols to deal with the drug users who
are bad employees while also ignoring the drug users who are good employees.

------
yitchelle
"One quick anecdote: a great engineer that I know well was recruited to work
for a top class company. They basically lost him when he was told that he
would be working with an old Java stack and his workflow would not be git
based. The tools matter."

How prevalent is this for "great engineer" looking for work? I guess that this
type of criteria would only be restricted for those working in the web based.
Other industries, not so much?

For me, a great engineer is someone who can create a great product with
whatever tools are available for them to use.

~~~
jedrek
Yes... but if you're a good engineer, why would you work with shitty tools?
All things being equal, why would you choose to work with tools you find
frustrating when you can work with tools you like?

That's the point: tools matter, and by holding on to crappy tools, you might
be giving people a reason to not work with you.

~~~
yitchelle
Because, sometimes, shitty tools is all you have to work with. I work in
embedded systems, and some of the tools I have available is absolutely the
shittiest. Imagine debugging a realtime OS on a 8bit micro by flashing an
error code through a LED.

~~~
Drakim
But is that because you don't have any other options available, or because
your company told you to use inferior tools?

~~~
yitchelle
This was the only option. The other debugging options were too intrusive and
would colour the information.

------
plinkplonk
" but we could bring in a world class team of engineers who were desperate to
build very large scale node services."

The word "desperate" is interesting. Are engineers really _desperate_ to build
"very large scale node services" (or whatever)?

~~~
edwinnathaniel
1\. Yes but only if technology 'X' is in-demand 2\. Yes but only for those who
like to try new technology and gets paid having fun :)

------
mattlutze
Am I the only person that read through a good portion of that and didn't
actually come away understanding "Why (walmart labs) runs an open source
program"?

It looks from their website like they have some really interesting work that
they've published, but I'm not sure what the utility in this sort of PR fluff
piece is.

------
kevan
There's an interesting balance between maintaining a competitive edge and
helping advance the field as a whole. Overall I hope companies lean towards
the open-source mindset. Working on problems that someone else has solved is a
lot less fun than pushing the frontier.

------
jyz
a group of amazing engineers, unfortunately, many are leaving

~~~
59nadir
Why?

------
gnu8
Are Walmart Labs engineers locked in the store overnight and forced to work
off the clock?

------
jvehent
You know what's cooler than working for Walmart? Working on disrupting
Walmart, and forcing them to increase the quality of the products they sell to
keep competing.

~~~
scott_karana
Huh? They're competing just fine by keeping prices _down_ , which is what most
consumers look for first.

You'd have to disrupt our current socioeconomic situation.

So unless you can beat their prices _and_ their quality, good luck.

~~~
objclxt
> _Huh? They 're competing just fine by keeping prices down, which is what
> most consumers look for first_

I dispute that. If consumers looked to price first everyone reading this would
be using a ChromeBook, but I imagine a sizable number are using MacBooks
instead. A more generic example: _some_ consumers will buy the cheapest
possible clothing, but _most_ consumers look to a reasonable compromise of
price and quality.

~~~
tvmalsv
Just because you're price sensitive, that doesn't mean that you'll buy
something you don't want, just because it's cheaper than what you do want.

There's been plenty of research that shows most people are more interested in
lower prices than making some sort of social statement.

~~~
wildgift
True. I think most people want the lowest price for a specific branded
product. They start off by deciding, more or less, on getting a certain level
of perceived quality, and then finding low prices. The price is secondary to
making the decision to purchase a product.

As far as making a "social statement" \- buying most recognizable or branded
products is a kind of social statement. If it weren't, we wouldn't have such a
diverse selection of cars, clothes and laptops.

