5 ms·
Those are mind-boggling numbers. Although I kind of doubt that "almost every" engineer has access to the entire repo, especially when it comes to the search ra
by rbinv 11y ago
Those are mind-boggling numbers.
Although I kind of doubt that "almost every" engineer has access to the entire repo, especially when it comes to the search ranking stuff.
- kcorbitt 11y agoFrom the article: "There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees."
- dfc 11y agoDid you read the article? "There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees. "
- afandian 11y ago> Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees.
- foobar2020 11y ago> There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees. > (...) all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers.
- Lewisham 11y agoFWIW, apart from the previously mentioned sensitive stuff, we give engineering interns the same level of access we give full-time engineers. We keep things open because it makes things faster; we have an excellent code search tool that's great for navigating through the Piper repo (e.g. finding subclasses, finding uses of an API) which really speeds up dev time. When we're not talking about the sensitive stuff, there's not much magic to what many engineers write every day, it's the same "glue technology X to technology Y" stuff you see everywhere, so I don't think there's any value to hiding that in the name of secrecy.
- petra 11y agoI though Google's search advantage really speeds up software development. I wonder if they use the same principle in alphabet across other engineering disciplines - creating some unique knowledge tools, and how do they look.
- maximilianburke 11y agoHow are changes that affect sensitive code handled? Are the owners of that code on the hook for making any API updates that the person pushing the change can't make?
- Lewisham 11y agoHaving never worked on the secret sauce, I honestly don't know. There is a small team of people who tend to do many of the global refactors, I might expect that they are given special permission.
- packetslave 11y agoI'm a random engineer and I have access to probably 99% of those 2B lines of code. The restricted stuff is a pretty tiny subset of the whole.
- qq66 11y agoWhy wouldn't almost every engineer have access to almost the entire repo? Most of Google's code is only relevant to another company working at Google scale, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. These are the companies with deep pockets that are willing to spend lots of money to acquire technology that will help them compete with Google. But none of these companies will buy code that's been stolen from Google. The most famous corporate trade secret, the Coke formula, was stolen by two employees who attempted to sell it to Pepsi. Pepsi alerted Coke, the companies worked together to bring in the FBI, and both employees went to prison: http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/05/23/coca.cola.sentencing/ http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/05/23/coca.cola.sentencing/