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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#241

Post by bananapub »

morning-coffee wrote: post #197
Balinares wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. The privacy enforcement infrastructure at Google is superlative.

But does it still give it all en-masse to the NSA? https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/five-things-to-k...

please try to be less of an idiot.

despite Google's recent pivot to suckling at the US defence department money teat, Google spends lots of money tellign the US (and everyone else's) government to fuck off in the courts, and and the finding out that the NSA had hacked Google's backbone led to a near instantaneous decision to encrypt all traffic on it, at a pretty large cost to the company in energy and effort.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#242

Post by aikinai »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #171
aikinai wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.

No idea what you mean by "that kind of monopoly". Google is a company which performs illegal acts to preserve its monopoly. Of course that will limit the viability of competitive products and services. That's why it's illega.

“That kind of monopoly” meaning the traditional definition where customers have no choice but to use their services.

Their “monopoly” is one of quality, habit, and convenience, not lack of consumer choice.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#244

Post by 0xpgm »

dehugger wrote: post #233
0xpgm wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we explain the deletion of the $135 billion Australian pension fund data that happened to UniSuper? Due to "an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank"? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

It seems that they explained things fairly clearly in your link? What kind of answer are you fishing for?

I'm responding to makerofthings' comment that data is about as safe as it can be, because there are so many controls and checks in place. If there were many controls and checks in place, would data loss of such a high profile customer occur?

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#245

Post by p_l »

0xpgm wrote: post #244
dehugger wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that they explained things fairly clearly in your link? What kind of answer are you fishing for?

I'm responding to makerofthings' comment that data is about as safe as it can be, because there are so many controls and checks in place. If there were many controls and checks in place, would data loss of such a high profile customer occur?

Note that the data loss occurred at least partly because the customer was provided with very much pre-beta offering that essentially didn't have all of the control plane done yet.

That's honestly a very hard issue to track because such legacy setups often can slip by later tooling, in this case the part where it was set to "auto expire" after certain time, but instead it became a production environment.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#246

Post by QuercusMax »

nazcan wrote: post #89
miki123211 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.

These are well-lit paths, that try to make it easy to take a server you want to run in production, and give you reasonable releases/monitoring/canarying for free (e.g. no one should have to configure something that stops pushes that are causing crashes of the updates tasks).

And even more importantly, the teams responsible have (at least in the past) done a pretty decent job of keeping things up-to-date and automatically moving you onto newer versions of systems. My services on Boq/Pod have been moved to new rollout-management platforms multiple times and I didn't have to do anything besides learn the new UIs.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#247

Post by VirusNewbie »

jiggawatts wrote: post #107
VirusNewbie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it. This is just a hyperbolic statement that should not be taken seriously at all. Look, Google isn't some fantasy land that some people might have lauded it as once upon a time, and it isn't unique in terms of pay or talent, but it is certainly at the top echelon. I did an interview loop for high level IC at both Azure and GCP simultaneously an…

> ...both Azure and GCP simultaneously and the different in talent level (as well as pay) was astounding. This is maybe the third time I've heard this mentioned here on HN, so now I'm curious: What specific kinds of differences? I imagine there might be a certain kind of prejudice against Microsoft and its employees, especially for "using Windows" or whatever, which I've found often unfairly coloring the opinions of…

> What specific kinds of differences?

Overall talent level. Almost everyone I've interviewed with at Google impressed me, as well as came across as thoughtful and kind.

I did interviews with many teams at Microsoft (9 technical interviews total) and the only person that impressed me is now at OpenAI.

Every single interview question I got at Microsoft was straight out of intro to CS /classic Leetcode.

They would straight up ask "find all anagrams", "string distance", "LCA of a tree".

Google instead disguises many classic CS questions, so it takes a lot more thinking. Microsoft seemed to just verify that you can quickly regurgitate classic algorithms in code.

I'm sure there are some great teams at Microsoft: but because each division/org is much more silo'd I think it's more likely a team has a lower overall bar.

Google makes everyone pass through a hiring committee and you're interviewed by people that have nothing to do with the team you might end up on. Meta is similar. Amazon has the team interview you, but they also have bar raisers come from other teams.

Microsoft seems the outlier here that someone can get on a team with only interviewing with people on said team.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#248

Post by xnx »

throwaway20222 wrote: post #36
danpalmer wrote: post #24

There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engi…

From my experience crossing eras; the tools have improved, and there are still some amazingly brilliant people, but the amount of overhead and the ratio of top level, passionate builders has dropped meaningfully. I have had a priority project stuck in legal hell for six months because it’s just a morass of logistics. The project is benign but it doesn’t matter. We are ossified. I look at it as somewhat inevitable con…

Success is its own trap. At a certain size, there's more to lose than to gain with any change.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#249

Post by fasa99 »

zrobotics wrote: post #83
ethbr1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's po…

google didn't so much kill a king as it maimed 6 billion peasants

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#250

Post by edanm »

zrobotics wrote: post #83
ethbr1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's po…

> Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business.

The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.

And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.

There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.

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