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In my experience as a Google engineer, this is mostly false. None of the work I or any of the people I know well at Google is on petabyte datasets; most people

In my experience as a Google engineer, this is mostly false. None of the work I or any of the people I know well at Google is on petabyte datasets; most people just aren't on the hot path of indexing/websearch/youtube. In fact almost none of the stuff I was asked about in my interview has been relevant to my work. I have thought about complex algorithms two or three times in the past year.

ljw1001 10y ago
Not only that, but (in my experience as a Google engineer), factors relating to the location of data (distribution and disk vs ram, etc.) often greatly outway algorithmic performance. Constant factors often dominate variable factors.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  Exactamundo! Cache/memory/disk locality dominates almost all other factors[1] unless you're doing something very special. (Speaking as a non-Google person who also likes to think that he knows what he's talking about.) [1] Well, it's really the amazing amount of throughput that modern architectures can achieve. Latency hasn't improved quite as much given the inescapable limitation of the speed of light.
nostrademons 10y ago
What department? I was in Search and used that knowledge all the time, and also did rotations on GWS, Google+, and GFiber. Certainly I used less of that knowledge for GWS (where everything you need is in-process) and for GFiber (where I was working on marketing & customer signup - the job req for this was actually different, and both interviews & job duties were much more like a traditional SWE job in other companies). But even Google+ needed a lot of algorithmic complexity knowledge; G+'s scaling needs are similar to Twitter's, and we know how that went. Perhaps it has changed as well; when I left (2014) they had just started encouraging engineers to focus on one particular task, with the architecture already defined, while when I started (2009) there were still a number of problems of the form "here's a feature we want to add; here's the data we have available; how can we build it?"
- alexbecker 10y ago
  I'm on Ads and Commerce front-end, and I also know a number of people on Android. These of course are mostly constrained by users' devices, so don't have the scale your talking about. But I also think the trend you're talking about of smaller roles has been continuing and has a lot to do with it as well.

ljw1001 10y ago

Not only that, but (in my experience as a Google engineer), factors relating to the location of data (distribution and disk vs ram, etc.) often greatly outway algorithmic performance. Constant factors often dominate variable factors.

lomnakkus 10y ago
Exactamundo! Cache/memory/disk locality dominates almost all other factors[1] unless you're doing something very special. (Speaking as a non-Google person who also likes to think that he knows what he's talking about.) [1] Well, it's really the amazing amount of throughput that modern architectures can achieve. Latency hasn't improved quite as much given the inescapable limitation of the speed of light.

nostrademons 10y ago

What department? I was in Search and used that knowledge all the time, and also did rotations on GWS, Google+, and GFiber. Certainly I used less of that knowledge for GWS (where everything you need is in-process) and for GFiber (where I was working on marketing & customer signup - the job req for this was actually different, and both interviews & job duties were much more like a traditional SWE job in other companies). But even Google+ needed a lot of algorithmic complexity knowledge; G+'s scaling needs are similar to Twitter's, and we know how that went. Perhaps it has changed as well; when I left (2014) they had just started encouraging engineers to focus on one particular task, with the architecture already defined, while when I started (2009) there were still a number of problems of the form "here's a feature we want to add; here's the data we have available; how can we build it?"

alexbecker 10y ago
I'm on Ads and Commerce front-end, and I also know a number of people on Android. These of course are mostly constrained by users' devices, so don't have the scale your talking about. But I also think the trend you're talking about of smaller roles has been continuing and has a lot to do with it as well.