311–320 of 352 posts
Found it here how Google Engineering Career Ladder is structured: https://labs.revelo.com/template/google-google-software-engi...
"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…
Google search was 1998. Google Maps was 2005. Gmail was 2004. Android was 2008. Youtube was 2005. Chrome was 2008. Docs was 2006. Translate was 2006. Yet in the last decade, they really haven't had many successes (perhaps with the exception of Google Photos - 2015) One would imagine that with nearly 200,000 employees at least one of them would have a good enough idea for a new product people like. But management and…
https://translatepress.com/is-google-translate-correct/
Another breakthrough is picture recognition. Did you know you can type in "motorcycles" and do an image search and there is ZERO text associated with many of those pictures of motorcycles? They really are mapreducing those pictures and running image recognition against a 17M open-source image library to assess "motorcycle-ness" of all those pictures! They started talking about picture recognition in the early 2000's but it really began happening in the late 2010's after they hired fei fei li, the mother of image recognition ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently explained Google's perf process to an employee of the US federal government, and was told that the performance review and promotion processes in the government were simpler and less wasteful.
Is the government getting good results out of their process? Remember when a bunch of ex-Google engineers had to step in and save healthcare.gov? If their simple promotion process works, why didn't they curate that talent in-house. People at L4 might not really like Google's process, but if some Distinguished Engineer shows up at your design review you're pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of valuable feedback.…
Cool. Could someone, maybe an ex-googler, comment on which parts of these work well and which don't? A lot of other companies get into trouble trying to cargo-cult what Google does when they are operating in very different environments wherein those practices aren't optimal. E.g. different levels of scale. Additionally, critics of Google may point out that their engineering culture may not be great on its own terms -…
Any prominent examples?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my ex-Google experience, here are the stages of denial about something that Google does which is good but the industry doesn't yet embrace. Stage 1: "We're not Google, we don't need [[whatever]]"; Stage 2: Foreseeable disaster for which [[whatever]] was intended to address happens; Stage 3: Giant circus of P0/SEV0 action items while everyone assiduously ignores the [[whatever]]; Stage 4: Quiet accretion, over seve…
Strong disagree. In my experience, this is not commonly why competitors don't adopt Google's practices. The main reasons I've seen are: 1. Money. Google essentially has a giant, gargantuan, enormous, bottomless pit of money to build a lot of this tooling (and also to take the risk if something ends up not working out). I think you might be able to say that other companies are just being short sighted if they don't im…
Eg - most telco companies in the US run at a scale similar to google. They need most of the software engineering best practices, internal tools teams, etc. They used to have it during Ma Bell times when they had a cash cow. That doesn’t exist and they’re left with scale and the points 1-4 described above.
This in general leads them to outsource to lowest bidder contracting firms that compound the shitty software problem. In the end it’s a miracle that all of it works together :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, money is only a factor when it comes to scale. That is, Google can afford to hire 30 engineers to support their CI infra, you can't. Everything else isn't. Unit tests aren't a luxury that Google's infinite riches allow it to have - they pay dividends whenever code exists for more than a few weeks. You can bet your ass Google engineers don't write unit tests for throwaway code. CI saves time, and while Google can…
CI can totally cost time, especially if it doesn't have a team of good engineers keeping it running sanely and ensuring it tells you useful things on failures. A CI bot which waits 24 hours then says "no", with a text file that crashes your browser and ultimately only contains the information 'exit code nonzero', which fails for reasons totally unrelated to your code change is dubious as a value add system. If that b…
Of course, the difficult part about managing a CI pipeline is writing quality tests, ensuring your tests don't take forever, deciding the right balance between mocking out 3rd party runtime service dependencies vs. calling their dev versions in your tests, etc.
But this is why I argue that the bare minimum should just be to have the CI pipeline created. If you don't have that, you are definitely going to screw over future you. Once that's there you can balance the cost/benefits of how much to invest in your test suite and test coverage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently explained Google's perf process to an employee of the US federal government, and was told that the performance review and promotion processes in the government were simpler and less wasteful.
Is the government getting good results out of their process? Remember when a bunch of ex-Google engineers had to step in and save healthcare.gov? If their simple promotion process works, why didn't they curate that talent in-house. People at L4 might not really like Google's process, but if some Distinguished Engineer shows up at your design review you're pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of valuable feedback.…
The problem lay with picking the cheapest contractor bids. If anything, the FAANGs should establish consulting arms for this kind of work.
Probably a bit off-topic, but since I'm a bit triggered by the 'abseil' in the domain name: I wish Google would relax their 'guidelines' when it comes to software that's also published outside of Google. Case in point: the Dawn C++ library (Google's native WebGPU implementation) has a dependency on abseil, and from what I've seen when glancing over the code, the only reason seems to be some minor string-related stuff…
I remember Sanjay Ghemawat or Jeff Dean mentioning that one of their big "optimizations" was to inline short strings into the string object- instead of a string that was "size_t len, size_t capacity, char *data", anything less than 24 bytes was just stored directly instead of with a pointer. when you're running mapreduces with trillions of small keys, this makes a big difference!
I'm stumbling into this thread right after experiencing what appears to be a pretty catastrophic failure of Google's main product. As I write this, the search results for "Google stock" (among other queries) returns zero results ("Your search - google stock - did not match any documents"). I'm not really sure what to make out of these discussions about how X or Y Google engineering is, while the production service is…
The query [ google stock ] would never return zero results.
If this is really happening to you, please post an actual screenshot demonstrating that a standard browser in incognito (not logged in) mode on a standard OS returns no results for [ google stock ].
I'm not saying Google's core product hasn't slipped but that's one query I run every day.
Testing, reproducibility, etc. These have always been common sense. It's just that people only adopt them when the big guys do it because we implicitly give authority to those with money and power.
It's not different than when you see folks making videos of "How a millionaire structures his time." Like, wtf. Those ideas existed before the millionaire. Many people already practice those. And those alone are not what made the millionaire.