Peter Zaitsev

At Percona a lot of vision aspects come from what we as a founders and later as a team consider good from the position of the other party.  With Employees/Consultant – the question is what would  I value working for the company ?   This is interesting because our job desires come a lot from personality aspects – some people love challenge others would rather have relaxed work with no challenges.  Some right success based payments other would rather have smaller steady guaranteed paycheck.  So I do not expect our approaches and values to be right for everyone but we expect you to love them if you’re person we would like to see as member of the team.

• Consultants are main value creators. We do not see  consultants as “cost”  but rather as the true value creators which deserve lion share of consulting revenues, with rest – sales, administration being the overhead which has to be controlled and minimized.   When we just started Percona someone suggested me the good way to have a good business to hire some cheap labor force in India and get great gross margins billing customers 10x what is paid to the people actually doing the job.  I thought that was wrong and unfair and this is not the road we took.   We have employees in high cost and low cost countries but we pay them the same way based on the share of the true value they bring.    In particular with remote work the country where you live becames similar choice to the local neighrborhood.   We’re able to pay some 65-70% of gross billings to the consultants in average (as salaries, benefits and payroll overhead) which is a high number considering we do a lot of small jobs which has significant overhead.     Percona is a business and we as a founders took the risk of starting the business expecting some payout. We have not however planned to sell the company for quick turnaround or rip off consultants pocketing 50% of their billings. We expected a lot of fun and some fair profit share from our labor.       Working for MySQL I did not feel like my contribution were paid well both in terms of value and equity compensation. And really if you look into the people who were paid best and who made a killing when Sun bought MySQL these were mainly  sales and marketing positions which in my opinion are responsible for the preseption and packaging rather than true value.  I think it is very intresting excersise for anyone to fairly assess how much value they are bringing to their current employee and who really profits from it.
• Consultants are Enterpreneurs. If you’re consultant you usually have couple of choices – either you’re doing your own stuff as independent consulting business or you go work for somebody else.   Working for yourself can be well paid but is risky and makes engineer to do a lot of things engineers often do not like to do – such as sales, dealing with contract negotiations, collections.   At Percona we wanted to provide something in between – we have people doing all this boring stuff such as sales, contracts, collections, insurance so engineers can focus on the stuff they like the most.  Plus working together we can be more efficient dipping into each other experience as well as have better life quality – if you’re lonely consultant your clients may well call you on vacations or in the middle of the night and you may have no one to cover you.  Working together allows to work more efficiently as well and shared client pool allows better utilization and less risks  which often means you can be paid more as consultant at Percona than being independent.  We also go further allowing consultants with good leadership coaching and management skills profit not only from their own work but from the work of people they supervise, so you can be running your small consulting business inside Percona.
• Success based compensation. We strive to provide personal service for our clients which means each client gets lead consultant and the group assigned to them.  Lead consultant would mange most of the client needs while the group will be well understanding customer envinronment and following on all the issues so more people can be involved if needed as well as lead consultant can take vacation or a sick day off.  As customer typically stays with consultant and the group for long time this means  if you’re doing the good work for the customer there is more work to come your way.   Good consultants typically can have better utilization and they get larger cut of the revenues too because of the pie.   We also bill clients based on efficient time only – we do not think it is fair to have customers to pay for consultants learning general learning (not specific to their envinronment) or for making mistakes which again converts to great opportunities for great consultants.
• Employees come first. We love our employees and want them to have a great life.     I know everybody says that.  Though I believe we can do a lot in this area as we do not need to sacrifise employee needs to please shareholders.  We engage in the businesses our employees are comfortable to deliver. We make sure they work comfortable hours and can spend time with their families or themselves.  We allow employees to put their family needs first, hence if there is any emergency with your family you just do what you need to do and the team will cover you.   As a good example I would say why do not we sell a lot of long onsite work – this is mainly because many of our consultants to dot want to travel away from their famility for weeks in the row.  I personally like to get out and visit customers in the Bay Area for the day or too and so we sell these services.     What is about customers when ?  Should not they come first ?  I think they should be happy on the second place because we ensure our consultants treat customer needs very seriously.  If customer has an emergency and his system is down and he is loosing thousands of dollars every minute I share his feelings of pain and urgency and a lot of other consultants do too.
• Team Work. Nobody is as smart as the team.  We are seen as a team so we succeed as a team or fail as a team.  It is important our consultants are not working alone and there is always their team mates to help them.   We believe the team work is very important both to provide great quality of services to customers as well as to have great joy from work for human being – in particular while working remotely active team involvement is very important.
• Openness/Integrity/Participation. When I was the part of management team of my first startup we  were far from open with our employees. They barely knew about company plans and deals came to them as a surprise, furthermore we were dishonest to them and our customers about what true intentions of various decisions were.  I was a junior partner at that time and though that is a way to do business.  When I came to MySQL I was shocked by how much transparent the company was.   Many things like company revenue were open to everyone and active participation of everyone was encouraged – meaning you could really get your opinion heard.  A lot of these things were lost in the corporate MySQL of recent years.   So back to principles – we are very open with our team about what we’re doing and why and we do not want to trick our employees clients or partners missleading them about facts, plans or visions. We actively welcome pariticipation of all the team in decision making process as reasonably possible.

A year ago I’ve been discussing with some people how unsafe and unsecure is working with small companies like Percona – which are small and bootstrapped, having no venture capital to relay on.     The comparison was obviously MySQL which just acquired by Sun at that point.

It is really interesting how things have changed.  As economic crisis stroke we see huge companies going bankrupt or having major cuts.  I know number of people which lost their job just because their whole department was no more.  They were great engineers but this is not enough as in many large companies people just tools.

With Sun/MySQL another thing is interesting – the people who were running MySQL before it was bought by Sun (Marten,Zack,Mark) are gone  (Zack is still at Sun but at other position). Many other people from senior management are gone as well  – these are the people which you as employee would have relationships and they would give you promises… and now be gone.    Now  even if you enjoyed Jonathan Schwartz vision about Open Source he may be no longer in position to implement his vision as Oracle takes over.

Interesting enough I think even Jonathan Schwartz  has little control here.   Sun is the public company and management team is not the major holders  -  Jonathan himself has well below 1% of outstanding shares.  Most shares are held by institutional investors and mutual fonds which have little of romantic nature – the dividents and capital gains are what they care about.   If head of the large corporation can’t deliver them he is risking to be replaced and the strategy which does not work be replaced with something which works.

The same applies to Venture Capital funded company – VCs want their money with a great return back first of all.   “Being Good” alone is not enough for them.   However if Founders/Visionaries and the team own the company they have the luxury of putting their values first and foremost if they choose to.

What does it really means if someone tells he can’t do something ?   This is surely the popular excurse of my eldest child.   It is very easy to say you can’t do something and it makes it hard to reply something if we assume the claim is true.  If I can’t speak French it makes little sense to speak French to me I will not understand…  I know  this because I tried.   To often however I can’t  means something entirely different – it means either I do not want to or I believe I can’t do it.

The “Can’t” which is really “I do not want”  is the hard one because there is a question of how much hardship (either physical or emotional) the person can take and which really depends how important something is.    For example if you ask me if I can jump from the 3rd floor – I probably can’t do it just for fun. I may break my leg doing so or worse, though in case of fire I would jump because alternative or being burned alive is even worse.  What people can and can’t in the casual life depend a lot on their self discipline and hardship they are ready to take to reach the end goal.

Taking it to extreme if you’re saying you can’t do something you should ask yourself what if your life or life of your loved ones would depend on you doing this ?  If you would do it in case of extreme crisis it is not “can’t”  it is rather you do not want it for some reason.    The reason can be quite valid one -  I can jump from the 3rd floor but  this will most likely result in the broken leg so I do not want to do it unless absolutely required.    There are things which I can’t do, such as flying.  Even if my life would depend on flying I would not be able to do it.

Assumed “Can’t” is  another story.   Too often we do not believe in our ability to do something, refuse to try, refuse to learn or accept general preception in the world about something being impossible.   I remember as a child I could not ride a bike and I was afraid to try until I was forced by my Mom to try hard enough to finally learn.  “Can’t” turned to “Can” in a single day.    Many things take much more time and energy to learn and same as in previous case it becomes a question of how much time and energy are you willing to make things possible.

I do not speak French but I can learn to speak it.  I just do not want it because there is a lot of time and effort required but the benefit for me is marginal.  I currently probably could not run a marathon  but I could spend time to train but it is just not something I want to do.  Time and energy are scarse and we all have to do our picks.

Note in this case we know people in our age and physical conditions do learn French or train for Marathon, however even if there would not be it is not enough to say it is impossible -  many things from running 100 meters in less than 10 seconds to swimming cross English Channel (La Manche)   There are people who dare to try and make things happen.   Do not say you can’t unless you can prove it is physically impossible.

There are very few real “I Can’t”  in this world the rest are  “I do not want to”

On the same topic I watched the nice lection by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett on Arithmetic Population And Energy.   As usually in such cases I like to check what oponents of the theory have to offer.

So what it takes for science and technology to offer continuing improving life for increasing population ?    There are basically three problems which need to be solved.

Energy This is most critical one as fossil fuels are not only non-renewable but they are also not recycable. Once its  gone its gone.     This is most pressing issue and so solution will have to be found short term.  The good thing the morden technologies already offer a lot – it is just lack of will (supported by cheap oil, coal, gas over last decades).   For  example France gets majority of its electricity needs from Nuclear power.  This is not as clean as many people would like but it is better than Oil or Coal.   There is Wind, Geothermal, Tide, Solar etc energy.   It would be also nice to see Fusion based energy developed getting safer alternative to nuclear power which also can work on much more abundant resources.    Solving Electricity problem is really enough -  the electric powered car or hydrogen based system can be “charged” by this kind of energy.

Resources There is only so much of various chemical elements available, and especially easily extractable.   Even with 100% recycling we get ever decreasing amount per capita.   There are also limited capacity of renewable resources  – forests, food growth etc especially as they get the pressure from the space element.

Space This is most theoretical issue -  with exponential growth we run out of space sooner or later Dr.  Bartlett says  with current rate of population growth we would get 1 person per square meter  for all land surface within 780 years.   This is of course far away but really problems  would happen much earlier considering how much space is really needed per person to produce food air etc, not to mention leisure needs, even with current life standards.

So what is really needed for growth to continue longer ?  Both for Resource and Space constrains we will need to go beyond the earth.   When do you think our technology will be able to get us out there ?   The first space flight was over 50 years ago and if you compare the progress to other parts of life it was not so astonishing. We furthest mandkind got so far is getting human to the moon some 30 years ago.    How likely is it we will be able to harvest resources from planets and asteroids in Solar system within next 50 years?   It does not seems likely to me.

The biggest problem here is energy again – the fossil fuels based space travel makes it too expensive to do any real production in the space so far.    Of course we can learn from science writers and hope there will be some transportation device discovered which would allow to teleport to any space but I do not think there is any foundation for such technology is.

If  Solar system remains rather distance source for  resources (and there is not much comfortable living space it can provide) the other stars which might contain inhabitable planets is even further in the future.  With hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy and millions of galaxies this would allow to maintain exponential growth for quite a while.

There is however more troubling point – even if population growth stops and resource consumption stops growing we are already quickly running of energy resources and transition is inevitable.  How would it look ? How countries and individuals are prepared for it ?    The government seems to avoid taking a really serious steps toward solving this problem as call to use less and reduce standard of living would not earn many votes.

Because of this I expect rather troublesome rather than smooth transition with technology advances born in pain and suffering.

I’ve recently watched couple of videos on youtube -  Chris Martensons “Crash Course” and another one focused on oil production in particular.      These are very good education videos  though you may lose your sleep for couple of nights as these are quite gloomy predictions.      These films both talk about  trouble exponential function starting from legend of chess invention and the modern day.     One very helpful thing was an aproximate formula for doubling knowing percentage growth -  you just take 70 and devide it by percentage growth and you get the dubbling time.   So if something growths 2% per year it will double in approximately 35 years. If it is 7% per year it will double in 10 years (and so grow about 10 times in the same 35 years).

Based on these films I had couple of interesting thoughs:

Population Growth – The population growth is what most of economies depend on. I know Russia or Scandinavian countries having zero population growth or actually population decline see this as a serious issue.   While if you really think about it at the long time scale – the population must stop growing sooner or later,  assuming humanity will be still bound to the earth.    Also the more people we have the less resources we have per person while at the same time everybody on the earth looks to continue improving standards of living (which typically means increasing resource usage).  How do we expect that  to happen ?     Well I believe most people are so tied up with the current issues they have little plan thinking about future… in particular about thinking about future which can be very different from their past.

So why countries are concerned about population growth ?  If you look at the GDP measure of the country two main ways to increase it is number of people in the country, which is relatively easy and then there is a productivity increase which is hard.  Everyone knows GDP should grow for healthy economy and the population growth is important factor for it.    We also need a population growth because if we do not we will have few children supporting a lot of old parents and so standards of living will decrease.   This also means the longer people live after they retire (and stop producing) the lower the average standard of living will be.

How world would look if population would top growing or decline ?

Religion Another thought I had is on religion -  Religions typically encourage population growth via large families.  Is there any religion which would put a limit on amount of children you should have ? I think it ranges from support of having large families to banning contraception all together.   It is clear where this comes from – hundreds and thousands of years ago  families needed to be large because children supported their families, because of high death rates etc.    World also was a savage place and small communities would have hard time protenting themselves from quickly growing neightbours.   The world has changed and the population is no more the ultimate measure of military power and you do not have to have may children for some of them to survive.    How many religious leaders however changed their stand on this matter  ?

Resources With demands growing exponentioally while extraction capacity following the bell curve this is a hard problem to solve for the world in a whole.  What does it mean for individual countries however ?  The price of  natural resources will continute to increase and countries which have a lot of resources will thrive financially and economically.     I see Russia as having better growth prospects than US for example and well it is already dictating half the Europe as it is badly dependent on Russian Natural  Gas for the energy.      Will countries having litte (or having used up all resources) just pay whatever prices resource owners decide to charge or will they try to change the borders by force ?

The countries pass their peak oil/gas/minerals productions like US or UK   will  likely start changes and hopefully resolve problems sooner.

I was thinking about how  MySQL compares to  PostgreSQL/EnterpriseDB in terms of business advantages.     Sun owns  MySQL source code which means they can sell it under commercial license and nobody else can, which is a blessing but it is also a problem -  this means Sun  have to own the copyright for all contributions/extensions which it is willing to take to the main tree.   This was OK in MySQL times when community was stagnant in terms of development -  there were very few significant external contributions to MySQL ever but  for variety of reasons were no external development too.

Now things have changed – we see much more community development done by Google, Percona,  OurDelta, finally now Monty leaves MySQL and starts his development company which will do significant development in MySQL space, not even mentioning Drizzle which is looking to be MySQL of the future.

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For a while I wanted to get a sub-notebook or NetBook as they call them sometimes.  Something easy to carry around to take notes etc.   I tried 9 inch ones and these had too compact keyboard while 10″ looked reasonable.

I believe it is very hard to pick something based just on reviews and description on the net so I decided to try couple of models available at Costco. Costco may not offer the lowest prices on computers but I am ready to pay a fair extra for return convenience.

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I always thought I had a decent memory, well, besides names -  I have very hard time remembering names and also mix similar names all the time.    It is funny however how memory plays if amount of issues you’ve got to deal with increases.

When I used to work with my own system it was cool I could remember everything, keep in mind all parts interactions, table names script locations  and do this for a long time which meant documentation was not the critical piece.        Working with customers at Percona I had to keep more and more systems in mind.      It worked fine for the first 10-20 but  later I started to mix things or simply forget details how things worked at given customers system.    I think this happens to other consultants too – this is just nature of human brain to manage information overload by discarding sum.

What do I learn from it?   Well  Documentation is Very Important. As many engineers I do not like documenting things too much but I understand it is critically needed as otherwise I would forget things and will have to ask customers again which is not a great service, or figure out loosing the time which is not good ether.      I also learned  not to chop time too much – it is much more efficient to spend actively working few days with the customer than stretch it for weeks spending half an hour every day.    Finally (and this is more for customers than for myself) – if you want consultant to be confident with your systems and to be able to act promptly if problems arise and offer you efficient advice it is best to have periodic work on your systems. It does not really matters what work that is – it could be checking things are in a good order, maintenance etc -  any work will keep the information hot in the consultants head and it also will help to notice changes and update docs appropriately.

I’ve run into this post recently and it  really well resonates with what I was thinking a lot recently.   The Open Source as a term became used for marketing for so many companies which have nothing to do with original Open Source spirit of sharing and collaboration.     What term can we use to describe the true Open Source Software which is among other things means you can use it for free for all required business functions – there is nothing you MUST pay for, there are however things you may CHOSE to pay – support consulting etc.

Note the features are not just bare bone features you need but preceived features pushed upon you by sales/marketing organization.   The MySQL is  actually a great example here -  you really do not need MySQL Enterprise to run any MySQL powered business but all company messages are focused on making you to think you can’t survive a single day without it if you’re doing real business with MySQL.

The Zmanda,  Infobright, Hyperric are all example of Commercial Open Source companies which will see you start purchasing software if you’re in real business.

Now do not get me wrong.  I do not see anything wrong with commercial software.  I also understand a lot of the Commercial Open Source companies could not have existed as purely Open Source companies… meaning Open Source community would not even have their limited OpenSource offerings.    I just would like to see some consistence in naming to avoid confusion and  understand when the project is completely OpenSource   or there are some commercial gotchas.

On the related note  – where true OpenSource project could originate from ?   I think it is close to impossible to get VC funding if you’re going to give away everything and have the model of people paying you for services.  True OpenSource projects should be humble and slowly growing… this is actually the case with old time MySQL which took years before they have gotten any decent web site or good looking CEO.  True Open Source project founders should be focused on making the difference more than making the money otherwise it is very hard to resist to add a bit of extra motivation for customers pay you the money.    The true Open Source project may also originate from hobby/fun type of project when money is off  the table.  The colaboration project like Linux Kernel or PostgreSQL  when there are a many parties making money on the customized/extended versions which allows to keep the core project clean.   It also could be give away type of project sponsored by  one or several companies which just use it for the business.  The examples could be memcache with FaceBook and SixApart or   Hadoop with Yahoo.

Because of Budget crisis here in California we’re getting scary letters from the School District about nasty things to come, such as reoving sertain positions, less extra activities and potentially large classes. The district also takes a lot of other measures to balance the budget such as looking at the bonds and tax mesures.   So a lot of things can be done but not asking parents to pay money – the education has to be free and available to everyone.

The public education is NOT free, it is just the payments  for it have to be collected in the indirect way so people think it is.   Schools are good here in Pleasanton, but guess what – the  house prices are hundreds of thousands of dollars more than in neighborhoods with not so good schools and rents are higher too.    The low income family would not able to afford living in Pleasanton anyway and so to afford equally good schools as more fortunate people.

I think it is good schools and local infrastructure is paid from the local taxes but I also think it would benefit a lot if schools could attract extra funding directly.   Why not get parents at the school to vote and see if they would like to pay extra tuition or take a staff or activity hikes for their children ?

Now there are probably some people in the school which can’t afford to pay.  So what ?    There could be income based “scholarship” programs to waive payments for those who can’t afford it.

In fact this is how I studied back in Russia in my latest years in “lyceum” – we had to pay certain tuition (even though it was mostly government funded) – and there were few people in the class who could not and so they did not.   Well though in that case it was mandatory with no parents involvement.

So I’m watching how it develops but it would be very sad to have set backs on education quality when a lot of local parents put it high on their list due to some laws which are designed to make things look like they are fair to everyone.