I wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was exciting and reality had not set in.
But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on?
A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech?
True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work.
Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.
I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010, all on Itanium systems.
In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal scale out architecture (aka "the cloud") was going to dominate, and that scale up systems were going the way of the mainframe. The thinking was that there would always be a healthy balance of scale out vs scale up, and btw, HP alone did $30B+ revenue yearly on scale up with very slow decline, just like the mainframe market, which is still $10B+, even today.
To put that in today's terms, if you pitched a startup with a $30B TAM, VCs will definitely be returning your emails.
So no, it wasn't embarrassing to talk about working on IPF any moreso than it would be to talk about POWER today. It's just another CPU architecture with some interesting properties but ultimately failed in the market place. Just like Transmeta or Lisp Machines.
What should be embarrassing, but clearly is not, is to slag off entire industries not knowing shit about them.
Edit: I think working on B-52 parts would be an amazingly fun job.
in my experience, the embarassement of a job doesnt come from the technology you are working with.
it comes from the people you are working with, and the people you are serving as customers, and whether these stakeholders are being treated well and having their needs met.
Probably startup culture is a better descriptor though I do think you often see the same mindset in at least outside looking in attitudes about the newer large SV employers.
Maybe you're a few years from retirement and your core skillset is itanium. Maybe you just need a paycheck. It was developed and maintained in many locales, including ones without a lot of alternative employment choices for an architect or vlsi designer.
I've met lots of engineers who are deeply passionate, but I've also met plenty for whom it's really just a job.
But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on?