
In Memoriam: Roger Faulkner - johannes1234321
https://www.usenix.org/memoriam-roger-faulkner
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ChuckMcM
I had the good fortune of having an office that was just a few doors down from
Roger's at Sun. The project to merge SunOS and AT&T System V was fractious at
Sun. People quit, passive-aggressive behavior was rampant, and generally the
frustration of working with AT&T "Systems Engineers" whom had never written a
line of code was often infuriating.

Roger pushed through the /proc file system in the middle of this morass and
was an excellent mediator between Sun and AT&T on various issues. I really
looked up to him for that and sought to seek out the common good of the
discussions rather than spend my time trying to eradicate the rampant
stupidity. At first it felt like I was "caving in" but later I realized you
could start from that point of common understanding and work out to the places
of stupidity productively rather than confrontationally. RIP Roger, you'll be
missed.

~~~
bcantrill
It's great to hear anecdotes from that era (presumably in MTV 5?); by the time
I showed up in 1996, it was MPK 17[1] and those days (from which there were
few survivors, for the reasons you allude to) were the stuff of lore. It's not
at all a surprise that Roger was in the middle of it all -- and it seems an
apt and valuable life lesson to focus less on eradicating stupidity and more
on suffocating it by building useful things, which Roger did for essentially
his entire career...

[1] Now Facebook Building 17 -- a succinct epitaph for Sun.

