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What does it take to make Google work at scale?

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Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#51

Post by jerf »

runamok wrote: post #50
davis_m wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located. I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have fri…

> I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Have you left the tiny midwest town and know that for a fact? Or do you base that on just word of mouth, articles, or..? I have lived in a lot of different places: (New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Southern California, Northern California (don't laugh re: me splitting those!) and briefly in Illinoism Connecticut and the Dominican Replublic. ) and find value in…

I live in the Midwest, and have traveled frequently to Silicon Valley for work. It's a nice enough area in most ways, but I get a really nice view of it through travel-expensed meals and hotel accomodations where the commute to the office is 10 minutes of pleasent traffic. The experience the locals have involves more traffic and rather fewer trips to modestly nice restaurants. I don't hate the area by any means, but it certainly isn't so much better than where I live that I would want the commute or to buy 5 or 6 fairly nice houses just to live there... which is a rough approximation of the housing costs vs. where I live now.

To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#52

Post by delroth »

nostrademons wrote: post #46
obeattie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that Google thinks of that as a problem. In fact, I'd argue a lot of the tech that many companies use nowadays exists because Google pioneered it.

I think that he's talking about the employee perspective, not the company perspective. Google's tech stack is mostly proprietary, which means you can't take your tech skills with you to a new employer. ...And I haven't found it to be a major problem, being an ex-Googler a little over a year out. Tech skills are easy to pick up on your own. My current startup is based on Node.js, a native Android client, and AWS; the…

As a Googler I find it to be the most fun and most attractive part of the job. I'm not too worried about learning specific technologies. Learning the core fundamentals of how these technologies work is however critical. But since Google is (still nowadays) pioneering a lot of that, esp. in the distributed world, that's not really a problem either.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#53

Post by selectodude »

lg wrote: post #40
davis_m wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located. I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have fri…

there's a chicago office, fwiw...

Google Chicago is almost all salespeople. Not much technology going on there.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#55

Post by jsolson »

davis_m wrote: post #37
munificent wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away Google was Fortune Magazine's #1 best place to work for six years in a row. The reason you occasionally hear a story about how Google isn't perfect to work at is because those are news . In general, it's a fantastic workplace.

Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located. I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have fri…

You could try Google Pittsburgh; it's almost the midwest :)

(I work for Google Seattle, but I grew up in Pittsburgh -- Seattle is definitely more my speed, but I do enjoy a trip home now and then)

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#56

Post by nickpsecurity »

sargun wrote: post #41
nickpsecurity wrote: post #13

Nice overview. I particularly like how they visualized BigTable and MapReduce. Will make it easier for some to understand. For those liking Spanner, Google has exceeded that with their awesome F1 RDBMS (built on Spanner/GFS) below: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Can't wait for someone to clone this. Come to think of it, has anyone cloned Spanner? I recall some calling GPS a hack but I…

The people who are working to it are the Cockroach Labs folks: http://www.cockroachlabs.com/

The Wired article says they're not fully replicating Spanner, esp is time tricks. However, they are replicating a lot of its other capabilities. So, that's still a great tech in development. Thanks for the link. :)

Still gotta wait a while for a full Spanner replacement with GPS tricks and all. Or something even better hopefully.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#57

Post by nmrm2 »

lg wrote: post #40
davis_m wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located. I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have fri…

there's a chicago office, fwiw...

Chicago is midwest in geography and climate only. Someone who grew up in a typical small midwest town would feel as out of place in Chicago as in San Francisco, New York, or Paris.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#58

Post by AnimalMuppet »

chetanahuja wrote: post #23
jasonpeacock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i.e. A lot of distributed systems problems can be simplified if you can trust your clocks.

Or guarantee that two separate coordinates on space-time can have identical values... which would mean breaking some laws of physics.

If the two clocks are stationary with respect to each other, that isn't a problem. Most of Google's servers are on the Earth's surface, so...

(Edit: Yes, different elevations cause a gravitational time dilation difference. For Earth's gravitational field and the elevation difference between different Google servers, I doubt it's an issue at the time resolution that Google needs to maintain.)

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58
chetanahuja wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or guarantee that two separate coordinates on space-time can have identical values... which would mean breaking some laws of physics.

If the two clocks are stationary with respect to each other, that isn't a problem. Most of Google's servers are on the Earth's surface, so... (Edit: Yes, different elevations cause a gravitational time dilation difference. For Earth's gravitational field and the elevation difference between different Google servers, I doubt it's an issue at the time resolution that Google needs to maintain.)

> If the two clocks are stationary with respect to each other, that isn't a problem. Most of Google's servers are on the Earth's surface, so...

...you can't generally guarantee that they are (even approximately) stationary with respect to each other, because points on the earth's surface (in general) are not stationary with respect to each other in an inertial frame of reference.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#60

Post by segmondy »

Thaxll wrote: post #43

The thing that might be scary working at Google is that you work with tech than no-one else uses.

There are plenty of other companies that also have tech that Google doesn't have or use too. Google has all these amazing tech, but I can assure you working at Google doesn't mean you will ever get to use it directly.
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