elgoog1212's comments

Sounds like a small scale outage, I wouldn't use that headline TBH. Amazon wouldn't even report something like this. We get various small outages from AWS every few weeks, and it doesn't even show up on their dashboards.

Go to any blog about "good" modern architecture. As it turns out "good" architecture these days is roof-less bauhaus with windows that take the entire front wall, including the bedroom. Looks good on Tumblr, impossible to live in, expensive to build, and insane heating bll. No, thanks.

Case in point: http://designhomes.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mid-centu...

Google has "snippets". You basically write up what you did last week. They aren't mandatory, but encouraged. I have found them useful because I can then just go through them and pick the things I want to write in my performance review. Before I started keeping snippets, I had a hard time digging up a sufficiently meaty list of accomplishments, because I'd just forget most of them. And you can subscribe to other people's snippets as well.

FB is just younger. They have plenty of horseshit projects already, the most recent and public one being Aquila. It's not like anyone is going to allow US-controlled drones stuffed with electronics of unknown provenance to fly in foreign nation airspace "for months at a time". CIA is salivating at the thought. Under the US laws, it's not like FB will be able to politely decline if they were asked to carry a little extra equipment.

So that if the public catches up to what it actually is PR damage on Google proper would be contained, and a new division ("Google Y"?) could be spun up from its tattered remains?

Where do I even begin. :-) State of the art achievements in object recognition, speech recognition, reinforcement learning, natural language parsing, natural language understanding, and so on and so forth, across the board. They employ basically all the prominent names in deep learning, except for Yann LeCun and a handful of others. Their research team is worth its weight in gold.

I don't disagree, but GoogleX is _not_ Google's research arm. Google Research actually produces very cool stuff that's beneficial to the company, and does so at a pretty rapid clip. GoogleX, on the other hand, takes bold, but not really research-worthy ideas and milks them for PR for years before they quietly die.

Y'all misunderstand why Google X exists. It exists for three reasons:

1. To obscure the fact that Google is an advertising company, first and foremost, by creating dazzling PR. The more insane the project, the better. Self-flying balloon shooting lasers from the sky? Here's 10 million dollars, go ahead and do it. Over time people lose interest, and those projects disappear into the void.

2. To draw the "best and brightest" in with the promise that they'll work on self driving cars, only to have them repair some obscure dilapidated ad serving backend, where they'll spend years nurturing futile hope that they'll get to work on the cool stuff at some point, and wiping their tears with hundred dollar bills.

3. To keep very senior employees from jumping ship to competitors.

If those three goals are met, actually producing a moonshot every 5 years or so would be gravy, GoogleX will exist even without producing anything at all, indefinitely.

OO is one of those things best used in strict moderation. Unfortunately, most people lack moderation, and strive not to necessarily solve the issue, but to show everyone just how smart they are. As a result we get object hierarchies 10 layers deep, and 1000-line source files (or worse, dozens of 100-line source files) which don't do anything meaningful.

This comment is made all the more humorous by the fact that Google doesn't actually do "microservices" internally. They have no qualms about building giant, monolithic binaries for things, and split things out based on the need, not some blind architectural fetish. The reason being, they don't like to be woken up by their pagers.

Memegen is actually the best part about Google. It's an internal meme site where people poke fun at the various failings (perceived or real) of Google, each other, and upper management. You can even poke fun at the founders and the CEO, and people often do. Though of course neither the founders nor the CEO actually read it.

The level of incivility is more of a side effect of being a large company. Google is also full of professional victims who blow even the minor transgressions (e.g. telling someone they look good at an offsite) completely out of proportion. This makes it seem like there is a lot more incivility than there really is. VPs on memegen is virtue signaling, nothing more, pay no attention.

As to the quality of engineers, I've worked with some AMAZING people at Google, far and away the best I've ever seen in my long career. After a while Google skews your perception as to what it means to be "good", because even the very worst SWEs at Google are well above average in the industry. Google would not be able to function without this, given that it takes a full 3-4 months to just become productive with its internal infra and kinda-sorta figure _some_ things out.

It is much more of a parallel track there, in the sense that it's a completely different job from that of a software engineer. Notice that they don't say anything about the length of each of the tracks. If it's money and power you care about, by all means, become a manager. Just don't expect that your job will be easy, or that you'll be able to do a ton of coding.

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually do besides playing power games and fucking up the products as a result (as if Google needed any help with that). Managers here are mostly ex-engineers, and most of them suck at managing. The reason why they are managers in the first place is that it's virtually impossible for an engineer to attain a level beyond T6 (and massive increase in comp that comes with that), whereas the requirement to do so if you're a manager is that you have a pulse, and you're able to take credit for your reports' work. You won't believe what kind of people get L7 and above at Google once they switch to management. At Google you don't have to be good at managing to actually manage. TL;DR: as an engineer your career at Google will end at T6 if you're lucky, and at T5 if you're not; this is where things _begin_ for managers. So Google values managers more.

FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.