Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student

[haky_nash]

Sergey and Larry didn't code much though. This one's hilarious:

In the book, early Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein says "I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders." "I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." One Google engineer from back then says the most remarkable thing about the co-founders' code was that when it broke, users would see funny error message: "Whoa, horsey!" It turns out the developers most responsible for building the Google that quickly became the Web's most powerful company are two guys you've probably never heard of. The first is Urs Hözle. According to one early Googler quoted by Edwards, Hözle was "the key" to Google's early success. Edwards writes, "Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code." The second is Jeff Dean. Edwards writes that "Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding." "It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school."

[sanxiyn]

Urs Hölzle, not Hözle. (Obviously, I heard of him.)

In 1994, Urs Hölzle and Lars Bak (yes, the one who wrote V8) co-founded a startup that wrote the fastest implementation of Smalltalk in the world. In 1997, Sun bought it and based HotSpot JVM on it. In 1999, Urs Hölzle joined Google as an employee #8.

[CmonDev]

Are there any samples of that elegant code available online?

[raverbashing]

Ah Jeff Dean, of Jeff Dean facts: https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/TSDhe5CvaFe

And yes, it seems there's a split between the algorithm creators and the code maintainers, unfortunatelly research code is good for that usually (research), but bad in memory usage, readability, speed, maintainability, etc.

[krat0sprakhar]

Interesting anecdotes. Which book is this from?

[learnyearn]

Looks like 'view source' reveals the true motivation, commented out ;-)

<!--<H4>Objective:</H4> A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.-->

[yohui]

Another comment:

    <!-- <IMG ALIGN=LEFT SRC="pics/diamond.gif">
    <H4><A HREF="/cgi-bin/sergey/HyperNews/get/forums/datamine.html">Data
    Mining</A></H4>
    I have recently acquired an interest in data mining and started up a
    meeting group.<P>-->

[hughguiney]

I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that “view source” was not as easy as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when “frontend development” was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn’t matter as long as it rendered correctly. It’d be like looking at a candidate’s PDF resume in a hex editor.

[raverbashing]

"His website is not Web 2.0 - doesn't fit our company"

"Doesn't say machine learning on his site - behind the times"

"Doesn't know Map-Reduce and Hadoop"

Yeah, I think we should pass on this candidate

[smm2000]

Three internships at well-known companies(Wolfram and GE), CS degree from Stanford, knows Python - with that resume you can get 10 offers in two weeks if you schedule interviews right.

[swombat]

Just because he could have started the company 15 years ago doesn't mean he's a good candidate to hire now.

[Chinjut]

"Ph.D.: expected June 1997."

Ah, someone else who didn't finish their doctorate and ended up working for Google instead. We're like kindred spirits, Sergey and I...

[atrilla]

From MSc to PhD in 2 year's time... in Spain this is the time you are expected to figure out what to research about. No doubt why Spain needs a bailout. So much to learn.

[runn1ng]

Years later and I still haven't seen decent and working LaTeX to HTML converter.

[pcmonk]

"It is unique in that it is in written mostly TeX and hence is a somewhat more elegant design than other converters. A small portion of it is written in Perl."

I have no conception of how any software written mostly in TeX with a little bit of Perl could have "elegant design" as a selling point.

[cpach]

For sufficiently simple documents you’re probably better of writing the master in a simple but structured format such as asciidoc[1] and then convert to whatever display format you like. However, if you do heavy math notation or other kinds of advanced formatting, I’m not sure this method will work that well.

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

[binarysolo]

I know the resume is just solid for today's standards, but do keep in mind that his research/work on data/ML is from 1990s -- and at that day and age this was cutting edge research, and people who leveraged this gained significant competitive advantages once they figured out how to properly execute.

I started doing ML work in 2007-8 and even 5-6 years ago it wasn't the hot domain yet that it is now.

[kriro]

Recruiters take note. Content >> style. He worked on some interesting projects but the writeup would be deemed "unprofessional" and his resume would be tossed to the bin by a huge chunk of HR departments/firms I've had relations with.

Would have been interesting to use a slightly altered version of this for a blind "which person would you hire" test.

[frozenport]

Nonesense, this is HTML from 1996. You will need to resize your browser window, at the least.

[kabouseng]

Would Sergei make a good employee?

[aaron987]

My thought too, especially when I noticed the typo:

"...similar tastes to extrapolate how much the you will like some other movies..."

[spacecowboy_lon]

and to put it into google to see if he woudl get hired today :-)

[laxatives]

I think the most interesting bit is that Sergey Brin was such an early adopter of python in its infancy. I'm guessing this resume is from 1993-4. Python was released 1991.

edit: nevermind, from the Masters date it sounds like its 95-97

[saiya-jin]

well you have probably exact date in the title of document ;)

[adoming3]

His home page from his Stanford days is pretty sweet, got to love his use of gifs. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/

[hughguiney]

“Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page.”

This is beyond trippy.

[cheese1756]

Does anyone know what the class with him and Larry Page (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/) was like?

[hammeiam]

That would be a great AMA

[akhilcacharya]

I think its interesting that he was able to gain admission into Stanford without having any conference papers in his undergrad years - I guess his grades and other research made up for it.

[zubairq]

And his CV as an adult:

http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv-photo

[Punoxysm]

It's a pretty solid resume, but I've seen a dozen better ones that don't belong to billionaires... Unless...

Sorry, gotta update my LinkedIn.

[funkyy]

Because the road to success is to copy successful people. Right?

[msie]

Heh, the Movie Rating project is cute (who hasn't done that?).

[confiscate]

if sergey and larry didn't code much, why do they care about making engineering-centric culture, instead of focusing on the business around engineering?