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The Jeff Dean Facts

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Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#151

Post by kentonv »

rayiner wrote: post #141
kentonv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. (Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.” Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on. If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards…

If I said I'd done something rude and people then argued with as much fervor about whether I'd actually been rude as they are arguing here, I would actually find it pretty weird.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#152

Post by dekhn »

squigz wrote: post #14

"When God said: "Let there be light!", Jeff Dean was there to do the code review."

I think this makes more sense: "When God said: "Let there be light!", Jeff Dean said "LGTM, Approve"

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#153

Post by kentonv »

vessenes wrote: post #123
kentonv wrote: post #18

Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…

Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.

Having worked with them I would say Sanjay is certainly NOT the "junior" partner. Nor vice versa. They have different strengths but I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer overall.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#154

Post by astrange »

hvenev wrote: post #88

> Jeff once simultaneously reduced all binary sizes by 3% and raised the severity of a previously known low-priority Python bug to critical-priority in a single change that contained no Python code. This sounds really plausible. A change to the C toolchain/library (for example, specialized/inlined memcpy) may affect binary sizes significantly, and may change the behavior of something the C standard leaves undefined (…

I have such a Python bug right now because of something that fork()s in a way that can't posix_spawn(). One of those is a lot easier to make performant than the other.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#155

Post by kentonv »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #150
rayiner wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.” Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on. If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards…

I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it. I for one comment Kenton for owning up to it. It's a hard thing to do. For what it's worth, I personally regard Sanjay in just as much awe as Jeff and understand that the meme is just an Internet meme and nothing more.

That's the ironic thing too... honestly, while I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer... I would say I personally identified more with Sanjay's approach and style.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#156

Post by westurner »

kentonv wrote: post #18

Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…

Maybe both in the URL?

You could add a meme generator that's like the Django docs tutorial with the internet web-poll

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#157

Post by tiffanyh »

Sesse__ wrote: post #129
dysoco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought exactly the same, but I guess Jon Skeet is from a different era altogether, we're moving into a world where many programmers perhaps have never even entered StackOverflow. I feel old.

Jon Skeet was very much a local hero on StackOverflow, and on StackOverflow only.

Claude & Codex are still learning from Jon Skeet.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#158

Post by utopcell »

ripe wrote: post #96

What does "readability" mean? It's mentioned in several of these jokes: "binary readability", etc.

It is a formal process via which it is confirmed that you know enough of X to submit code to the codebase, where X can be c++, java, python, etc. If you don't have X readability, then, in addition to your main code reviewer, you need to have a readability reviewer look at your code, who will be focusing only on X, not the logic of your code.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#160

Post by utopcell »

jackblemming wrote: post #70

Jeff Dean is a lot smarter than me, more accomplished, and more talented. But let’s be honest. He was a big part of TensorFlow and TensorFlow sucks. And I imagine it reflects a lot about Jeff Dean internally. Smart, clever, but maybe over complicated or over engineered. And that itself reflects hugely at what Google tends to like, and why he’s so successful (at Google). And if we’re being brutally honest, I wonder ho…

Let's be honest: you don't have the slightest idea about what you're talking about.
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