Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#31

Post by [deleted] »

zooq_ai wrote: post #11
mgaunard wrote: post #3

I don't understand why so many people insist in revering others for what they've achieved. If you need to revere anything, revere the achievement, not the man that did it.

It's perfectly fine to revere people and get inspired. Jeff Dean, Dennis Ritchie, Isaac Newton, Claude Shannon, Stephen Wolfram and others are brilliant thinkers who have impacted the world. In fact, the higher the IQ, the better you are able to discern true intellect vs loud mouths. I for one revere Jeff Dean and I'm proud of it. It doesn't affect my life negatively in any way. In fact betting on people that I rever…

[deleted]

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#32

Post by dskrvk »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #23
ipsum2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2018 when the article was written, Jeff was relatively unknown outside distributed research (ie MapReduce) and Google, and Sanjay probably completely unknown.

And they used this PR for what? This isn't a puff piece. Those guys are the real deal.

It elevates Google itself. “It’s a place where people like Jeff and Sanjay work!” Not saying that was the main motivation for producing the article and definitely not trying to question the protagonists’ achievements.

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#33

Post by nostrademons »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #28
gandalfgeek wrote: post #25

(former Googler) It was really special to see how this pair basically laid out the foundations of large-scale distributed computing. Protobufs, huge parts of the search stack, GFS, MapReduce, BigTable... the list goes on. They are the only two people at Google at level 11 (senior fellow) on a scale that goes from 3 (fresh grad) to 10 (fellow).

(current Googler) One of my coworkers got assigned Sanjay on one of her CLs recently and she had no idea who he was. I had the pleasure of working with Sanjay as his intern at SRC the summer before he joined Google, and he taught be a lot of cool tricks related to compiler development. Both Sanjay and Jeff Dean are PhDs with PL focuses.

It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of the dynamic optimization techniques that made it into HotSpot. Much of the HotSpot team itself was hired by Google, notably former Search SVP Ben Gomes and several less famous employees. The Plan 9 team (notably Ken Thompson and Rob Pike) went on to create Sawzall and then Go within Google; Ken Thompson was himself famous for creating C before then. Guido van Rossum (Python's creator) wrote Mondrian, the first code-review tool in Google. Lars Bak worked on BETA, then joined Urs to work on Self and Strongtalk before implementing the first version of V8 at Google. Dan Sugalski of Parrot & Perl 6 fame has held a bunch of infrastructure rules within Google.

It's like nearly everyone in a who's-who of the language design & compiler implementation community circa 2002 ended up working for Google, and the few that didn't (notably Chris Lattner of LLVM and Slava Pestov of Factor) ended up at Apple.

[1] https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ceci...

[2] https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-p...

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#34

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

nostrademons wrote: post #33
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(current Googler) One of my coworkers got assigned Sanjay on one of her CLs recently and she had no idea who he was. I had the pleasure of working with Sanjay as his intern at SRC the summer before he joined Google, and he taught be a lot of cool tricks related to compiler development. Both Sanjay and Jeff Dean are PhDs with PL focuses.

It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of…

And now they can't even build a chat app. So sad how much Google has fallen. That's why research and product should be separate.

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#35

Post by adventured »

dskrvk wrote: post #32
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they used this PR for what? This isn't a puff piece. Those guys are the real deal.

It elevates Google itself. “It’s a place where people like Jeff and Sanjay work!” Not saying that was the main motivation for producing the article and definitely not trying to question the protagonists’ achievements.

You could say that about any article that is even slightly positive about anyone that works for Google. It's an absurd premise. It prevents the telling of stories that have good outcomes.

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#36

Post by adventured »

mgaunard wrote: post #20
pimlottc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do great things yourself, then it's natural to look for people who have similar things and figure out how to emulate them.

How do you plan to emulate the luck of being in the right place at the right moment?

Ah so it was luck that so many exceptional people ended up at Google [Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Sun, AWS, Apple, et al] at a similar time.

As opposed to it being obvious that very interesting things, opportunities, were happening at those companies. With word spreading throughout the industry. Along with talent flight into said companies, so as to pursue said opportunities along with other talent. Employees in tech typically see these things happening, it's not a big secret.

You can in fact do a lot better than blind dart throwing.

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#37

Post by BurningFrog »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #7

I struggled badly on a pair programming position. It's not like I don't like reviews or cannot work alongside another person. It's I cannot learn while someone is talking to me or trying to make me place the cursor somewhere. I'm all in for code review, even in pairs. In fact, I do that with a junior dev I have assigned and it's working well for us. I leave him thinking and come back to evaluate his solution. I find…

That's funny/sad.

I've never learned so much about programming as during my years pair programming!

I got to see how other people solved problems, and surprisingly often, they have a completely different approach than what I though was the obvious way. Half the time their way was better than mine, and I became a better programmer, and half the time I taught the other person something.

This went on day after day, for years!

There is a technique for pair programming well. I was lucky to join a team of PP pros, and picked it up pretty fast. Sounds like you had worse luck :(

> I cannot learn while someone is talking to me

This sounds strange. Normally people learn by listening to others talking, right?

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#38

Post by BurningFrog »

dskrvk wrote: post #32
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they used this PR for what? This isn't a puff piece. Those guys are the real deal.

It elevates Google itself. “It’s a place where people like Jeff and Sanjay work!” Not saying that was the main motivation for producing the article and definitely not trying to question the protagonists’ achievements.

Google is already the most known and respected software company in the world, so I doubt that was the motivation.

Re: The Friendship that made Google huge (2018)

#39

Post by woooooo »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #34
nostrademons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of…

And now they can't even build a chat app. So sad how much Google has fallen. That's why research and product should be separate.

They built a ton of stuff after those researchers were hired, including original gchat.

They stopped being able to build a chat app after different people were hired.

Post reply on HN