4 ms·

"He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via Dropbox" Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's produ

"He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via Dropbox" Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands of people.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dward 9y ago
This is not common practice. Google has had a strict no iCloud, no Dropbox policy for a while. We can't even have code from the core codebase stored locally on our company issued laptops.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Is everything done on networked drives then?
  - dirtyaura 9y ago
    Builds are run on servers, using Blaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000
    - dantiberian 9y ago
      What about editing? Do you mount a network drive to edit files on your computer?
      - KerrickStaley 9y ago
        Roughly that, although it uses a Google-developed internal tool. Source code files can be transferred to one's workstation (which lives in a Google building), but not to one's laptop—all work on a laptop must be done through a remote session, either SSH, VNC, or via a (again Google-internal/proprietary) cloud-based editor.
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        Google uses FUSE extensively. Basically there are a bunch of daemons that make the various cloud source repositories look like a local disk.
        dward 9y ago
        But even those aren't allowed to be mounted to your corp laptop. Those clients can only be mounted on a workstation unless you are doing iOS development.
      - nevir 9y ago
        There's also several options for purely online editing (devving on a Chromebook isn't bad)
  - jacobmarble 9y ago
    SWEs are issued a desktop machine, and a laptop. The laptop (Mac, Linux or Windows; employee's choice) is essentially a very expensive remote desktop client. All development work (except some OSS stuff) is performed on the desktop machine. (Or that's how it was when I worked there until 2016.)
    - pythonaut_16 9y ago
      Are Chromebook Pixels a common SWE laptop then? That seems like almost the exact case that they're designed for
      - dward 9y ago
        Yes chromebooks are very common developer laptops, up there in numbers with (still most popular) macbooks and linux laptops. They are more than sufficient for the lion's share of engineering roles. Corp engineering is pushing them hard because they are cheap and secure.
- lsseckman 9y ago
  That's more of what I would expect! Does that make it feel more like he was intentionally storing company files in a personal account?
  - dward 9y ago
    In my opinion, yes.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jon_richards 9y ago
Given the bugs/missing features in the google docs lineup, I've never believed they are dogfeeding. It's been out for 10 years and it still has formatting issues. Change the zoom level of your browser and tab-aligned things will suddenly unalign. Made a report with pictures/figures? Good luck printing that, everything will move around as soon as you go to print it. The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which is just sad.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Fwiw, i was there for several years and every team i was on used it pretty much exclusively. I never came across the issues you describe, but have heard similar things from others: if you're not in a position where it matters how pretty your docs are, then I would imagine the issues you're talking about don't really matter. IME it was hard to find anything to complain about. For example, I don't think I've printed a document in a decade, except when dealing with dinosaurs like govt or banks, which my team didn't deal with.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  AFAIK from dozens of Googlers, it's used for everything from PRDs to financial models and contracts. So maybe you just don't know enough.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Isn't that even more damning, if they use it for everything and it's still riddled with issues? At the very least it implies that they're naively unaware of a lot of their user stories.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      Like with a lot of projects Google dogfoods, it's well-adapted to their values and has a lot of blind spots on things that are unimportant to Google. Google executives don't care about formatting; the vast majority of them are technical, and culturally Google basically has a "don't care about superficial stuff, you have bigger problems to worry about" attitude. And the idea that you might want to print something out is a terrible anachronism; the whole reason we have multi-exabyte datacenters is so you never have to deal with paper again. It's not naivete, it's arrogance. Basically Google wants to see you move into the 21st century, and if you don't, that's your problem, you'll eventually be forced to because the rest of Google's feature set is so good. Same reason IE support is pretty shitty on a lot of their products. The only two real gaffes I can think of that really were naivete were the sound on the PacMan doodle, and the lack of privacy controls on Google Buzz. It basically never occurred to Googlers that you might get in trouble for having sound blaring out of your work computer (this, BTW, is my fault, I did the code review for the sound on the Pacman doodle), or that you might get in trouble because your boss knows about stuff you do on your personal time.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dward 9y ago

This is not common practice. Google has had a strict no iCloud, no Dropbox policy for a while. We can't even have code from the core codebase stored locally on our company issued laptops.

rtpg 9y ago
Is everything done on networked drives then?
- dirtyaura 9y ago
  Builds are run on servers, using Blaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000
  - dantiberian 9y ago
    What about editing? Do you mount a network drive to edit files on your computer?
    - KerrickStaley 9y ago
      Roughly that, although it uses a Google-developed internal tool. Source code files can be transferred to one's workstation (which lives in a Google building), but not to one's laptop—all work on a laptop must be done through a remote session, either SSH, VNC, or via a (again Google-internal/proprietary) cloud-based editor.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      Google uses FUSE extensively. Basically there are a bunch of daemons that make the various cloud source repositories look like a local disk.
      - dward 9y ago
        But even those aren't allowed to be mounted to your corp laptop. Those clients can only be mounted on a workstation unless you are doing iOS development.
    - nevir 9y ago
      There's also several options for purely online editing (devving on a Chromebook isn't bad)
- jacobmarble 9y ago
  SWEs are issued a desktop machine, and a laptop. The laptop (Mac, Linux or Windows; employee's choice) is essentially a very expensive remote desktop client. All development work (except some OSS stuff) is performed on the desktop machine. (Or that's how it was when I worked there until 2016.)
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    Are Chromebook Pixels a common SWE laptop then? That seems like almost the exact case that they're designed for
    - dward 9y ago
      Yes chromebooks are very common developer laptops, up there in numbers with (still most popular) macbooks and linux laptops. They are more than sufficient for the lion's share of engineering roles. Corp engineering is pushing them hard because they are cheap and secure.
lsseckman 9y ago
That's more of what I would expect! Does that make it feel more like he was intentionally storing company files in a personal account?
- dward 9y ago
  In my opinion, yes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jon_richards 9y ago

Given the bugs/missing features in the google docs lineup, I've never believed they are dogfeeding. It's been out for 10 years and it still has formatting issues. Change the zoom level of your browser and tab-aligned things will suddenly unalign. Made a report with pictures/figures? Good luck printing that, everything will move around as soon as you go to print it. The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which is just sad.

wutbrodo 9y ago
Fwiw, i was there for several years and every team i was on used it pretty much exclusively. I never came across the issues you describe, but have heard similar things from others: if you're not in a position where it matters how pretty your docs are, then I would imagine the issues you're talking about don't really matter. IME it was hard to find anything to complain about. For example, I don't think I've printed a document in a decade, except when dealing with dinosaurs like govt or banks, which my team didn't deal with.
ucaetano 9y ago
AFAIK from dozens of Googlers, it's used for everything from PRDs to financial models and contracts. So maybe you just don't know enough.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Isn't that even more damning, if they use it for everything and it's still riddled with issues? At the very least it implies that they're naively unaware of a lot of their user stories.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Like with a lot of projects Google dogfoods, it's well-adapted to their values and has a lot of blind spots on things that are unimportant to Google. Google executives don't care about formatting; the vast majority of them are technical, and culturally Google basically has a "don't care about superficial stuff, you have bigger problems to worry about" attitude. And the idea that you might want to print something out is a terrible anachronism; the whole reason we have multi-exabyte datacenters is so you never have to deal with paper again. It's not naivete, it's arrogance. Basically Google wants to see you move into the 21st century, and if you don't, that's your problem, you'll eventually be forced to because the rest of Google's feature set is so good. Same reason IE support is pretty shitty on a lot of their products. The only two real gaffes I can think of that really were naivete were the sound on the PacMan doodle, and the lack of privacy controls on Google Buzz. It basically never occurred to Googlers that you might get in trouble for having sound blaring out of your work computer (this, BTW, is my fault, I did the code review for the sound on the Pacman doodle), or that you might get in trouble because your boss knows about stuff you do on your personal time.