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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

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Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#131

Post by YZF »

miki123211 wrote: post #120
YZF wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the ideas here but I think the actual chance of getting sued for $3b is so small as to be negligible in the context of costs. It's also questionable how much the additional process/overhead moves the needle on that chance. Larger companies also have various "shields" against these sorts of lawsuits. E.g. they lobby politicians, they employ lawyers, they have legal and IP protection. Just like anything else in…

This explanation wasn't just about lawsuits. Other things in a similar category are: - negative media attention (media scrutiny increases proportionally to organization size) - doing something that upsets an influential group and may have consequences for the rest of your business (think how big the outrage would have been if Apple, Google or Microsoft tried making an "Uber" app before Uber existed) - bringing down t…

I work for "big tech" and have worked for others. Other than some CYA training there really isn't a lot of cross talk between engineering productivity and this sort of risk aversion.

Process, complexity, inefficiency is just something that happens for big companies and big software. Things slow down and then there's a negative feedback loop and things just go down hill. Innovators dilemma sort of stuff.

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#132

Post by repeekad »

sollewitt wrote: post #74
repeekad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase thrown around was “collaboration headwind”, the idea was if project success depends on 1 person with a 95% chance of success, project success also had a 95% chance. But if 10 people each need to succeed at a 95% chance, suddenly the project success likelihood becomes 60%… In reality, lazy domain owners layered on processes, meetings, documents, and multiple approvals until it took 6 months to change the te…

Coordination Headwind: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

Thanks, this may be the name they used it’s been a little while

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#133

Post by latentsea »

yndoendo wrote: post #85
Phelinofist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are peer-bonuses?

I was in Kindergarten and watching my fellow classmates get gold star stickers on their work. They were excited when it happened to them. I saw it as being given nothing of real value and person could just go to the store and buy them for $1 or $2. It is a social engineering technique to exploit more work without increasing wages. Just like "Employee of the Month" or a "Pizza Party." Company I work for does this with…

They weren't getting a sticker. They were getting a dopamine hit.

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#134

Post by aweiher »

mwbajor wrote: post #95
braza wrote: post #10

One of my pet peeves with the usage of complex(ity) out of the traditional time/space in computer science is that most of the time the OPs of several articles over the internet do not make the distinction between boundaried/arbitrary complexity, where most of the time the person has most of the control of what is being implemented, and domain/accidental/environmental complexity, which is wide open and carries a lot o…

Im a HW engineer and don't really understand "complexity" as far as this article describes it. I didn't read it in depth but it doesn't really give any good examples with specifics. Can someone give a detailed example of what the author is really talking about?

System Thinking 101

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#135

Post by tuyiown »

braza wrote: post #42
tuyiown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is addressed with the complex vs complicated intro. Most problems with uncontrolled / uncontrollable variables will be approached with an incremental solution, e.g. you'll restrict those variables voluntarily or involuntarily and let issues being solved organically / manually, or automatisation will be plain and simple being abandoned. This qualify as complicated. Delving in complicated problems is mostl…

I don't think this is adequately addressed by the "complicated vs. complex" framing—especially not when the distinction is made using reductive examples like taxes (structured, bureaucratic, highly formalized) versus climate change (broad, urgent, signaling-heavy). That doesn’t feel right. Let me bring a non-trivial, concrete example—something mundane: “ePOD,” which refers to Electronic Proof of Delivery. ePOD, in te…

I was very centered on the software part of the problem. A complex problem can be solved with a complicated chain of small technical solution. At implementation level, its complicated, not complex, e.g. you mostly need knowledge of the general problem to understand the solution, and many added things make things complicated.

My take is that if your complex problem is only solvable by complex software (e.g. not a combination of simple small parts), and _cannot_ be reduced to simpler things, you are in the complex space.

Maybe it's too reductive, it's just my opinion, but it's a good way for me to determine predictability on ability to solve a problem with many unknown, at the engineering level. The dangerous blockers are in complex space, identifying them early is critical. Complicated stuff can be worked around and solved later.

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#138

Post by nottorp »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #65
citrin_ru wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For small scale one can build a simple system but I see many are trying to copy FAANG architecture anyway. IMHO it’s a fallacy - people think that if they’ll would copy architecture used by google their company will be successful like google. I think it other was around - google has to build complex systems because it has many users.

It’s an infectious disease among developers. Some people would spend weeks making a simple landing page, and it would require at least 3 different cloud services.

I'll raise you 7. If i recall correctly. At my tiny workplace we once hired someone to do a simple industrial web site that wasn't likely to ever have more than 2000 users and 10k "entities" in the database.

7 is the number of different AWS services he managed to use for just a prototype.

We thanked him and rewrote the thing.

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#139

Post by gilbetron »

I've interviewed many current and ex Googlers, and one thing we've discovered is that we have to be careful overindexing on the scale and complexity of systems they work on. Google is insanely huge and complex, but have insane and complex tooling to help developers. "I worked on a project that affected 250 million users" is something we'll here and sounds amazing, but in reality, from their perspective, they spent months working through the complex Google dev, QA, and deployment process and pushed out a relatively straightforward change, but that change was for a massive system.

They have a unique and distinctive experience, but it usually isn't what you expect. It is rare to encounter someone from Google that actually built something of significance, and those that have are always at the staff+ level and had been there 10+ years.

If I were to make another generalization, the [g|x]ooglers that worked on relatively "small" projects are often the most interesting, as they had resources to build something from the ground up and do attempt some really interesting projects.

Re: Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google

#140

Post by neilv »

yodsanklai wrote: post #116
neilv wrote: post #84

> My immediate reaction in my head was: "This is impossible". But then, a teammate said: "But we're Google, we should be able to manage it!". "We can do it!" confidence can be mostly great. (Though you might have to allow for the possibility of failure.) What I don't have a perfect rule for is how to avoid that twisting into arrogance and exceptionalism. Like, "My theory is correct, so I can falsify this experiment."…

Sorry to say that, but this sounds a bit like a fantasy. I think the vast majority of Google employees don't see themselves as particularly brillant or special. Even there, lots of people have imposter syndrome. Actually, I've found this is a constant in life, whatever you achieve, you end up in a situation where you're pretty average among your peers. You may feel proud to get into Google for a few months, and then…

Understood, but I meant to ask about the more general problem -- not specific to Google, only prompted by that quote.

(Also, to be clear about my examples: I don't think Google is fabricating their dissertation research, nor do I think Google is genocidal.)

If you're suggesting there's a lot of humility, yet "But we can do it!" still works, that's great, and I'd be interested in more nuances of that.

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