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What does it take to make Google work at scale?

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Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#41

Post by sargun »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #13

Nice overview. I particularly like how they visualized BigTable and MapReduce. Will make it easier for some to understand. For those liking Spanner, Google has exceeded that with their awesome F1 RDBMS (built on Spanner/GFS) below: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Can't wait for someone to clone this. Come to think of it, has anyone cloned Spanner? I recall some calling GPS a hack but I…

The people who are working to it are the Cockroach Labs folks: http://www.cockroachlabs.com/

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#42

Post by asuffield »

tikhonj wrote: post #16
MattCruikshank wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away" I loved working there. Sure, who your boss is has a huge impact on your happiness. I ended up with a boss I enjoyed working for. Does that review make you want to stay away, too?

It does for me, at least. I'd absolutely hate having my job satisfaction determined so much by a manager and team that I was assigned . (Ideally I wouldn't want it impacting much at all , but truly flat companies are still hard to find, despite the rhetoric.) It works for some people, but it won't work for me.

Your first team after hiring can be a bit arbitrary - you aren't cut out of the decision loop, but as an outsider it is impossible for you to know enough to make an informed decision.

Every team after that is your choice with full access to information. Google has a thriving internal job market.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#44

Post by obeattie »

Thaxll wrote: post #43

The thing that might be scary working at Google is that you work with tech than no-one else uses.

I'm not sure that Google thinks of that as a problem. In fact, I'd argue a lot of the tech that many companies use nowadays exists because Google pioneered it.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#45

Post by jordz »

It's presentations like this that give me a that spark to go out and build crazy-shit. Sometimes you HAVE to reinvent the wheel because wheels just don't work to move objects the size of the planet the wheel is bound to. I'm not a fan of re-inventing the wheel by any means but it's this kind of stuff that makes me love going to work every day and basing ideas off presentations like this!

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#46

Post by nostrademons »

obeattie wrote: post #44
Thaxll wrote: post #43

The thing that might be scary working at Google is that you work with tech than no-one else uses.

I'm not sure that Google thinks of that as a problem. In fact, I'd argue a lot of the tech that many companies use nowadays exists because Google pioneered it.

I think that he's talking about the employee perspective, not the company perspective. Google's tech stack is mostly proprietary, which means you can't take your tech skills with you to a new employer.

...And I haven't found it to be a major problem, being an ex-Googler a little over a year out. Tech skills are easy to pick up on your own. My current startup is based on Node.js, a native Android client, and AWS; the one before it was Django & Heroku. Haven't tried looking for jobs yet - I made enough at Google to not have to worry about that for a while - but I occasionally get in-bound interest from big-name, fast-growing startups. Most clueful hiring managers look for experience with problems, not with solutions, and Google lets you face problems that the rest of the industry won't deal with for a while.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#47

Post by amaks »

zo1 wrote: post #21
ska wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Time keeping is one of the things that is most often underestimated and screwed up at any scale, in my experience. Many a subtle bug turns out to be a poor assumption or misunderstanding about how clocks work. Or calendars.

Can you elaborate on the need? What possible reason, short of a very contrived one, is there for having to keep a large number of machines' clocks in-sync? And for that matter, why would anyone build any process/system/software that requires a distributed system's machines to all have their clocks in-sync. I am baffled.

There is a simple reason why it's needed - in distributed transaction you need to establish the causality of changes. That's why truetime is needed.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#48

Post by mahyarm »

drcross wrote: post #20
robrenaud wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working at Google is pretty cool. Personally, I get paid pretty good money and have tons of resources to build models that serve 100s of millions of people.

After 9 different interview rounds I've all but giving up on trying to get into there. Any advice on trying to get in?

Master Cracking the Coding Interview? Have a positive attitude?

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

zo1 wrote: post #21
ska wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Time keeping is one of the things that is most often underestimated and screwed up at any scale, in my experience. Many a subtle bug turns out to be a poor assumption or misunderstanding about how clocks work. Or calendars.

Can you elaborate on the need? What possible reason, short of a very contrived one, is there for having to keep a large number of machines' clocks in-sync? And for that matter, why would anyone build any process/system/software that requires a distributed system's machines to all have their clocks in-sync. I am baffled.

[deleted]

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#50

Post by runamok »

davis_m wrote: post #37
munificent wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away Google was Fortune Magazine's #1 best place to work for six years in a row. The reason you occasionally hear a story about how Google isn't perfect to work at is because those are news . In general, it's a fantastic workplace.

Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located. I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have fri…

> I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Have you left the tiny midwest town and know that for a fact? Or do you base that on just word of mouth, articles, or..?

I have lived in a lot of different places: (New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Southern California, Northern California (don't laugh re: me splitting those!) and briefly in Illinoism Connecticut and the Dominican Replublic. ) and find value in their differentness.

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