Walmart Labs: Why we run an open source program

<i>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.<p>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.</i><p>Never heard such glory come from anything associated with Walmart before.<p>Remote working is what you do everyday even if you are &#x27;co-located in the same building&#x27;, 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.

<i>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 :)</i><p>The majority of great engineers... in what field? Web development? Probably. Some language communities are also disproportionately represented. As a whole though, I can&#x27;t buy that everyone has been totally assimilated into GitHub.<p>I also like how everything other than GitHub (not even Git) and Perforce has just about spontaneously evaporated according to this paragraph.

I&#x27;m not going to comment on who is writing the article because that&#x27;s not the point.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Just because the article mentions Walmart Labs working on hapi (apparently an express-like nodejs framework) doesn&#x27;t mean that HN should suddenly disregard the content of the article (as some of the other comments seem to be doing).

<i>&quot;The supply doesn’t meet demand, so it is important to do everything you can to help attract, and retrain talent.&quot;</i><p>Here we go again. Please stop lying! Property supply also doesn&#x27;t meet demand, guess what happens to prices? Salaries are static =&gt; no major demand.

Dion&#x27;s a smart guy and a great communicator and I&#x27;m really excited that he&#x27;s been pushing hard at Walmart Labs since moving on from Mozilla (and Palm.)<p>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&#x27;s nothing but solid good for the world.

Walmart Labs talks about wanting to bring in great engineers, and yet they make prospective engineers piss in a cup.<p>Glad they&#x27;ve got their priorities sorted out.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>How prevalent is this for &quot;great engineer&quot; 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?<p>For me, a great engineer is someone who can create a great product with whatever tools are available for them to use.

&quot; but we could bring in a world class team of engineers who were desperate to build very large scale node services.&quot;<p>The word &quot;desperate&quot; is interesting. Are engineers really <i>desperate</i> to build &quot;very large scale node services&quot; (or whatever)?

Am I the only person that read through a good portion of that and didn&#x27;t actually come away understanding &quot;Why (walmart labs) runs an open source program&quot;?<p>It looks from their website like they have some really interesting work that they&#x27;ve published, but I&#x27;m not sure what the utility in this sort of PR fluff piece is.

There&#x27;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.

a group of amazing engineers, unfortunately, many are leaving

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

You know what&#x27;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.