5 years, 7 months, 5 days

[kirkcudbright]

Yesterday, I was laid off from ISC. By freakish coincidence, this was 6 years to the day after I was laid off from Wind River.

I can't point you to a press release, because officially I'm still on payroll for a while. Because it's apparently easier to get a job if you still have a job. So you didn't hear anything about layoffs here. (Really, I asked them to CC those of who are "affected" when they come up with the Official Messaging, because I don't know how to spin this.)

Lest you get the wrong impression, I don't hold any animus towards my current-and-almost-past employer, because this is what employment-at-will is all about. We both get to decide, at any point, that we're done, and that's it, it's over. Gone, baby, gone. It doesn't matter that they're a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the same legal rules apply, and the same revenue/expenses logic applies.

And really, this is how I leave jobs. I haven't actually quit a job since 1988, when I graduated* university and moved to the Boston area. In 1990, the grant that funded my MIT job ran out. In 1997, I volunteered to be laid off from FTP Software. In 2008, our projects were internally outsourced to our new Beijing office, and we were let go when the Chinese were fully trained.

*"Graduated" is a slightly strong term. It turned out that I had a technical writing course to complete, which I completed while working at MIT, so my degree says January 1990.

Comments

[totient]

Bummer. It goes without saying that Akamai wants to talk to any soon to be former ISC employee, and there are openings in some very closely aligned departments. There's a referral bonus that of course I wouldn't mind, but Larry Stone is slightly closer to that end of the world which means he'd be an even better person to have refer you.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Sorry that you got laid off, but, as you say, that is what it is.

Good luck in finding your next endeavor in a timeline that makes you happy.

[ceo]

Well, suck. :-( What totient said about Akamai, and I'll add that it's a really nice place to work.

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've heard that, but please tell me what it is that Akamai does that they might want someone like me to do.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

they do a lot of what amounts to protocol design, since their business is figuring out how to efficiently serve requests for content.

elf my elf can give you the goriest details, i think.

i suggest not going through larry stone.

[totient]

Among other things, we serve more DNS requests than all the root nameservers put together.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm going to have to think about this for a minute before I decide if i'm surprised by this or not, but given how most dns servers cache things, my intuition is to not be surprised by it. "How many DNS requests actually make it all the way to a root nameserver per second" is a decent Feynman question...

[totient]

http://www.akamai.com/60seconds claims that Akamai serves 4.4e6 DNS requests per second. This number is out of date, but let's use it because the numbers we're comparing it to will also be out of date.

I have not found a single site with stats for all thirteen root nameservers but https://labs.ripe.net/statistics/?tags=k-root seems typical. If it is the total is around 2e5 requests per second. Even if it is not the total is surely less than 4e6. I believe something like 2% of that is actual legitimate traffic.

[ceo]

The short answer is, a lot of things that make the Internet faster for their customers, via edge caching and redirection and a lot of clever math. I'd be happy to give more details in person, though since I'm off working on what might or might not be our Next Hot Thing and don't do much with our core businesses, I don't know as much as some others do. That said, I too will selflessly volunteer to refer you. :-)

I have no doubt, with your network protocol background, that they would be able to find things for you to do.

[annathepiper]

Bah, sorry to hear that. :( Hope you won't be unemployed long!

[zahraa]

Oh, no. I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope you find something else very soon!