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Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

students.googleblog.com

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Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#91

Post by therealmarv »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

Even if this is a recruiting post... let's stick to the facts: Her work has nevertheless saved 1.5 PB per day. All of the people who are saying that everybody can do this and implement this: I bet your hacker excellent skills cannot save 1.5 PB traffic per day. And it's nice to see that an interns work can have so great results. Kudos to Google that they have great programs for young people. And I'm also forever thankful to them that I had the opportunity to work as Google Summer of Code Student and Mentor for them which was a true life changer for me!

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#92

Post by aasarava »

sametmax wrote: post #79
dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

I think the reaction arose because of the person being put on the spotlight would not have been so if she have been a male. Meritocracy being part of the dev culture, promoting somebody achieving regular stuff because of the gender is ill-perceived. It's like when you go to a conference, and half of the talks are a promoted minority of some sort but they are not that good. You feel cheated. The fact is there are wome…

"The fact is there are women doing great work and talks. Make noise about them."

And here is a woman who did great work, and Google is making noise about her. Why is this particular case not valid, when it's doing exactly what you recommend?

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#93

Post by ljk »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

> the negativity here really indicates the kind of latent discrimination that so many URMs & women in tech complain about

was with you until this. hn's negativity is across the board, it's very unlikely there's discrimination going on here imo

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#95

Post by davb »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

URMs?

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#96

Post by dajohnson89 »

djrogers wrote: post #72
dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

> a senior engineer at Google could have implemented this compression and it would still be HN worthy, No, I doubt it would be. How many of the hundreds of little features in the google play store have been posted on HN with an article about the person who implemented them? Also, I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to assume that any scoffing is due to sexism. I see the exact same cynicism and lack of aw…

1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store.

Agreed on the high level of cynicism here -- we've also come to expect that. Moreover I never come to HN (my account is five years old) to point out sexism/racism -- it's just too sensitive and difficult of a subject and to be honest I'd rather just read/talk about topical things without getting political. But again, what I pointed out is stark and I have no other explanation for it (believe me, I want one).

Let me point out the title of the blog: "Google Student Blog: Google news and updates especially for students". Of course there is PR going on, and of course the achievements of an intern will often be on a smaller scale. But this particular achievement is high-impact and the intern deserves credit on that blog for her work. If you're not impressed, then just move on.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#98

Post by astrodust »

sp332 wrote: post #41
PedroBatista wrote: post #39

Please fix the title, its 1.5 PB, not GB

It says 1.5M GB == 1,5000,000 GB == 1.5 PB

That really is the worst possible way to put it.

Why not express it in nanobytes?

PB is a unit everyone is more familiar with than MGB.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#99

Post by gurgus »

ThePawnBreak wrote: post #59
gambiting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She started in Krakow, Poland. 2700 GBP/month is what the prime minister of Poland makes, it's an absurdly high salary for the local market there. I've friends who work as professional C++ programmers there and they make about 1000-1500 GBP/month working for huge corporations.

She worked on something completely different in Krakow, and earned a lot less (about 1000 euro I think). The compression work was in London, where 2700 GBP doesn't go a long way at all. Rent is about 1000 GBP for a room, and 2700 GBP is about 1800 net, so that leaves 800 GBP per month to spend on food, transportation and other expenditures. I happen to know the person in the article. I was also an intern at Google th…

For an intern, that is insanely good.

edit: In fact, for a lot of people, that is insanely good! Apologies if I came across as an asshole when I said "for an intern".

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#100

Post by ChuckMcM »

bobdole1234 wrote: post #22
okreallywtf wrote: post #13

There isn't much information but this reads more like an advertisement for google internships than anything else. Not to denigrate her work, she could very well be brilliant and have gone above and beyond, but from how it reads they could be blowing it up to make it seem like every intern has a huge impact and you could too! Either way good for her, but not sure why this is so high up on HN.

It's almost like Google might be recruiting.

I suspect this is exactly correct. First, it plays to a lot of colleges who are having career fairs this month as their seniors consider what to do after graduation. Second it plays to what has been the biggest job selector for new graduates over the last 5 years, "Will I be able to make an impact?". The number one way to discourage people from going to BigCo is to point out that they are going to spend 3 - 5 years just getting enough of a political network developed in order to be given a chance at an assignment that might move the needle slightly.

Last year I was walking around a recruiting event at CU and just listening to the pitches being made by companies Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn (and in full disclosure was making the same sort of pitches for IBM with "Hey its the Watson group, its the most important company project and we're building one of the most important projects in it!" all to counter the fact that it was hundreds of thousands of employees, most of which were not having much impact at all.

You need stories where you can pitch them "if you're brilliant enough and work hard enough you can be the person who changes the world." otherwise the siren song of startups of "You will probably eat lunch with the CEO at least once a month, and everything you do will be really impactful." will carry the day.

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