Holy moly, a mention of Bogdan! He was a legend of his own. Some of the most consequential changes, like elevating your service to higher QoS levels, which something like e.g. Gmail would require, were gated on his approval and his only. Someone made him a SW Easter egg, but the story already on the Internet gets some basic facts wrong.
The Friendship That Made Google Huge
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Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#22“I don’t know why more people don’t do it,” Sanjay said, of programming with a partner.
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Maybe because most employers won't pay for that. Two people? For one level of output? You'd have to prove yourself a level 11 googler before most places would give you the luxury of working as a long-term pair.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#23After reading this article, I'm surprised that Google doesn't encourage pair programming / developing developer relationships at the level that Jeff and Sanjay have here. One might even argue that the manner in which interviewing and hiring is currently done in the tech industry in general might actively work against building the sorts of relationships where the output is greater than the sum of the inputs.
Edit: added a missing "the".
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#24"Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard it ended up on another computer."
Sounds like he discovered the Rowhammer exploit?
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#25> Most of the fragile insights that laid the foundation of a new vision emerged not when the whole group was together, and not when members worked alone, but when they collaborated and responded to one another in pairs
The article gives several examples of this dynamic, but one that came to mind for me was how Monty Python members created sketches for Flying Circus:
> Writing started at 9 am and finished at 5 pm. Typically, Cleese and Chapman worked as one pair isolated from the others, as did Jones and Palin, while Idle wrote alone. After a few days, they would join together with Gilliam, critique their scripts, and exchange ideas. Their approach to writing was democratic. If the majority found an idea humorous, it was included in the show.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#26Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#27If you want to see an example of Sanjay's elegant code, take a look at his Go stream package: https://github.com/ghemawat/stream
Sanjay's "experimental" directory in Google's repo -- a place where users can commit unreviewed code that are just ideas, or park some code that isn't ripe yet -- is full of gems.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, teams are good but every once in a while you need that lone crazy Tom Bombadil genius to come along and save your butt from disaster.
And sometimes you need eagles
The really bad times are when your entire universe screaches to a halt until Brandon Sanderson helps it limp across the finish line.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#29Anyone know where folks like Peter Norvig and Urs Hölzle fit on the L1-L11 scale? I assumed that all of the early employees/now legends were at the top level, so I was surprised to see the article state otherwise.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#30Was surprised to hear the audio version of the story has a different title - "Binary stars". I think the editorial board went with a more click friendly title.