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If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot r
by wallflower 8y ago
If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team".
To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...
2016 (might be more recent ones) update on AI at Google
http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large-scale-deep-learning-at-google.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large...
Video of full lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY
EDIT: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff are like the dynamic duo of large scale systems engineering.
- snikeris 8y agoAlso, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.
- 0xEFF 8y agoApproaching operations from a software development perspective wasn’t unique to Google. Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoOps is probably more reasonably called engineering than most so-called “software engineering”.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- y4mi 8y agoThe book : https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html
- jsty 8y agoSomeday Google's going to have to list the risk of Jeff Dean leaving on their 10-K ... (not entirely joking)
- WilliamEdward 8y agoCompanies actually do this behind the scenes. They list individual employees as financial assets.
- otp124 8y agoHmm, I hadn't heard of this practice before, and so I went searching and found this article to be a decent summary (posting here if others are curious): https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employees-intangible-assets-44349.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employees-intangible-assets-...
- dsnuh 8y agoThey certainly must have him insured... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insurance
- Liron 8y agoNo, there's no point for Google to pay a third party to insure any risk of $1B or less.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoAre there any risks at all worth insuring for Google? What’s the point of insurance if you have $100B in the bank?
- lloydde 8y agoEven some small companies (100+ employee) carefully track attribution of their top N% of non-VP employees and tie it into executive bonus.
- deleted 8y ago
- zjaffee 8y agoI think it's important to mention Sanjay Ghemawat is very likely just as important to google as Jeff Dean, just Jeff has been made the public figure for a variety of reasons.
- wallflower 8y agoThank you. I increased the answer to six words because you are very right.
- pk2200 8y agoUrs Hölzle (engineering VP) and Eric Veach (AdWords) also don't get nearly as much recognition as they deserve.
- ebikelaw 8y agoThat doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?
- dilyevsky 8y agoBecause they didn’t have Craig Silverstein and many many others. Lets not pretend Jeff and Sanjay, as much talented and prolific as they are, are singlehandedly responsible for Googles success.
- jasode 8y agoI don't know if Sanjay and Jeff worked directly on DEC's AltaVista search engine but that project was treated as a low-priority "demo showcase" for DEC Alpha servers instead of being seen by DEC management as a new multibillion dollar internet business to pursue. DEC could have had a "Bezos-hey-we-can-sell-computing-as-AWS" moment with AltaVista but they missed it and let Google surpass it.
- nostrademons 8y agoThey didn't - AltaVista was done by Louis Monier and Mike Burrows, both of whom also worked at Google and both of whom also made significant contributions to the codebase. I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's management as well - SVP Alan Eustace came from there - and yet the team under Eustace at Google was much more effective than the team under Eustace at Western Digital. I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
- pm90 8y ago> I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed. So true. As an engineer, the most direct impact on my productivity has been the team and manager. But the manager is a SPOF: if he/she is bad, then my productivity suffers. I have yet to work in an organization where there was a good chain as you mention though. Maybe that's what sets Google apart. Smaller companies tend to have shorter management chains and I prefer them for that reason.
- grosjona 8y agoI think that Google's dominance has almost nothing to do with technology and almost everything to do with customer lock-in. For me, duckduckgo.com is as good as Google but I still use Google because it's the default search engine for Chrome's address bar - And that's where I do all my searches from these days. If Duckduckgo made their own browser which was of the same quality as Chrome then I would definitely consider using it and switching to Duckduckgo for search as well.
- tonysdg 8y agoOut of curiosity, what prevents you from using Firefox? It allows you to specify a default search engine -- which you can set directly to DDG.
- hk__2 8y ago> Out of curiosity, what prevents you from using Firefox? It allows you to specify a default search engine -- which you can set directly to DDG. Chrome allows you as well.
- dcow 8y agoI use FF and DuckDuckGo. It's super easy.
- arminiusreturns 8y agoI also heavily use the cli ddg search. Might try that out for anyone else who lives in the terminal.
- tEMporality7 8y agoI used to wonder why search engine companies care about which engine is the default in a browser because it only takes a few seconds to change it but now I know why. People are lazy :/
- still_grokking 8y ago
- ginger123 8y agoI disagree with passion. The vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin is responsible for Google's success. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat executed Page and Brin's ideas, but they were not the key decision makers. Did Dean and Ghemawat decide to buy and then build Android? Did they decide to build Google Maps? Did they decide to buy YouTube?. The answer is no. Page and Brin would have hired other smart people if Dean and Ghemawat weren't available or had they left Google.
- wallflower 8y agoI agree, as I was not talking about the overall success of Google, just the success of Google's secret sauce (their backend infrastructure) that enabled it to sell ads and deliver search results with a high level of quality. If you read some of the books about early Google, they (Jeff, Sanjay et al) were really, really struggling to do stuff like index the web without the crawler collapsing mid-way. That's how MapReduce became to be developed. Yes, Danger/HipTop, YouTube, and Keyhole are arguably the three smartest acquisitions that Google made.
- hinkley 8y ago> the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Never been to Berkeley but I've heard something similar enough times that I've adopted it as one of my own aphorisms. When the order of magnitude changes, so do the good solutions. (This is also my thesis for why we keep repeating software history. We stop using a solution because it doesn't work with the current ratio of speed or costs for network, memory, storage and processing. Then someone introduces 10GB networking or SSD disks and the old solution works for 5 more years until someone introduces a new CPU that scales better horizontally or vertically and we start over.)
- dmead 8y ago"And now their team's attention is on AI..." is quite the hype thing to say. Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer.
- fooker 8y agoThey have proven they are a good 'car designer' too over the last 3 years.
- mrep 8y ago> "And now their team's attention is on AI..." is quite the hype thing to say. Googles AI blows every other companies out of the water. > Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer. What? How is that analogous?
- paganel 8y ago> Googles AI blows every other companies out of the water. That is certainly true, but that could also mean that Google will be the first company to hit certain unsurpassable road-blocks. Just look at Google Translate, which IMO hasn’t qualitatively improved for the better for at least 2 years now, even though most probably the data on which it is based is at least an order of magnitude “bigger”. The same might also happen to autonomous driving.
- nl 8y agoDean's PhD was in neural networks. Also TPU2 is the only decent alternative to NVidia hardware in production, so that's a decent sign.
- rhymenoceros 8y ago> To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. You might actually be thinking of Jeff's Stanford talk from a few years ago (2011). Slide 21 of: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//people/jeff/stanford-295-talk.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Ensure your design works if scale changes by 10X or 20X but the right solution for X often not optimal for 100X There's no attribution, but that is good advice I've kept with me throughout my career. Props to the original author (perhaps apocryphal at this point?).