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Lessons from 14 years at Google

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#541

Post by agobineau »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…

insane mindset. This kind of thing is why there is no industry left in anglosphere outside US

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#542

Post by chaboud »

xmddmx wrote: post #342
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #241

> 15. When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring. This is Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Right, this annoyed me too - it was stated w/o attribution as if novel. What is the name of the law when someone writes a think piece of "stuff I've learned" and fails to cite any of it to existing knowledge? Makes me wonder if (A) they do know it's not their idea, but they are just cool with plagiarism or (B) they don't know it's not their idea.

I don't know if there's a named law, but the word for not knowing and believing that something remembered is a novel idea is "cryptomnesia".

Knowing that you know something by teaching is Feynman's method of understanding. Basically, on scanning, I don't particularly disagree with the content of the post. However, treating these things (many of which regularly show up here on HN) as being due to "14 years at Google" is a little misplaced.

But, hey, it's 2026, CES is starting, and the hyperbole will just keep rocketing up and out.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#543

Post by oftenwrong »

thayne wrote: post #483

> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. As someone who has been on call a lot, this is only true for bad or incomplete abstractions. When you are on call (or developing) you can't possibly know everything about the system. You need abstractions to make sense of what is going on, how the system as a whole works, and know which parts to hone in on when things go wrong. And it is…

I don't think it's meant to be a point against abstraction or a point against complexity. I think it's widely understood that abstraction is part of how advancement is made in our practice, as well as in other disciplines. I have taken this saying to be an observation that there is almost always possible failure beneath the façade provided by the abstraction. Therefore, yes, you avoid having to let that complexity enter your brain, but only when the abstraction is holding. Beyond that point, often after pages are sent, you will still have to engage with the underlying complexity. A proactive measure following from this idea would be to provide support in or alongside your abstractions for situations where one must look under the bonnet.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#544

Post by zwnow »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…

Yup same story here, also warehouse optimization. I was the reason the employees got new scanners and oh my... the scanners didn't have a physical keyboard. Now all the 50yo+ would have to aim on a touch display which is apparently impossible.

Also we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#545

Post by anilakar »

vbezhenar wrote: post #354
Aurornis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#546

Post by rahimnathwani »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…

  The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.
Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#547

Post by mike_hearn »

WalterBright wrote: post #496
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

> The negative responses from clients were instant. Back when I was designing TTL circuits, the TTL specifications gave a min and max time for the delay between the inputs and the outputs. I was instructed to never rely on the min delay, as the chips kept getting faster and the older, slower replacement parts will not be available anymore. The IBM PC was frustrating to many hardware engineers, as too much software re…

Ah, the Turbo Button!

I think by the time I got my first IBM PC the button no longer did anything, but it was still there on the case for some reason. I remember pushing it repeatedly, puzzled that nothing went faster.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#548

Post by BeetleB »

rapidfl wrote: post #524
BeetleB wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. You're just missing the thing people are complaining about: The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear (which can take years in a large company). My previous company is in a bad position and many such folks are finally being outed. But it takes lots and lots of screwing up before the fat is trimmed.

> The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear Guess this is just random evolution at play. Some companies will pay a bigger price than others. And not everyone even recognizes it and pinpoint it like you did. But overall influencing people is on net good skill for the individual. And what is good for the geese is good for the gander??

> Some companies will pay a bigger price than others.

The problem is that typically a large company has one or a few golden geese. They can milk it for a long time because of an existing moat. The moat keeps shrinking, but it can sometimes take a decade or two for others to catch up.[1] That's plenty of time for such folks to make a career of playing politics well without contributing much.

Lots of people at that company left before things went bad and are poisoning other companies.

[1] Just look at Google and search. Or Microsoft and Windows. Or even Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#549

Post by woooooo »

eru wrote: post #507
xboxnolifes wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?

The price of housing can rise even faster than incomes. Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.

Housing, schooling, healthcare, daycare, food.

Samsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that.

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