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Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers
- jarym 8y agoI had never thought about this before but from this repo I can see all these smart engineers at the big tech firms live within their own walled garden (or prison?). If it weren’t for such a vibrant open source world then they’d really be stuck if they tried to apply their knowledge outside of their companies. Thanks for sharing the repo!
- akhilcacharya 8y agoThey don’t, and if you’ve got the G-factor, pun intended, to get an offer at Google you can get an offer anywhere. Which, honestly, makes this repository all the more confusing to me. I’m sure there are some people that have lived only within this ecosystem, but that’s the possibly the height of privilege.
- badcoderman 8y agoEh you'd be surprised, I couldn't even get an interview with some places, got denied from others, but now work at Google doing full stack. Every technology I use though is Google internal, and I don't have much knowledge of full stack development outside of Google. Some companies just test your algo / ds / system design knowledge, and sure I do fine there, but any specific knowledge I'm useless. TBH I think I'm not very good at any one language either because I often have to switch
- akhilcacharya 8y agoThat’s what I’m saying, you’ve proven to be smart enough to figure it out. Besides it’s a moot point since no company that competes with Google for talent asks exclusively domain specific questions in their interview loops.
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- lazyasciiart 8y agoDoesn't every college hire at FANG fit that description?
- akhilcacharya 8y agoNot necessarily - there are more options at the FANG I am at for this to happen.
- q3k 8y agoI've had companies reject me explicitly because they had bad experience with other googlers. I'm honestly considering dropping it from my CV.
- WestCoastJustin 8y agoIt is almost the other way around. Many of these open-source projects, have roots with engineers leaving these big companies and wanting to use the same tools, so they create them. Or, by these big companies releasing papers and then folks creating open-source versions. Here's some examples of the latter: Dapper (w/ OpenTracing) [1], Spanner (w/ CockroachDB) [2], Borg (w/ Mesos) [3], Dremel (w/ Drill) [4]. I'm sure there are tons more examples but these are just off the top of my head. [1] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36356.pdf https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36356.pdf [2] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub39966.pdf https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub39966.pdf [3] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43438.pdf https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43438.pdf [4] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36632.pdf https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36632.pdf
- kyrra 8y agoPrometheus is borgmon. Which is a bit funny as it's used by k8s now. It's also funny as the author left Google, wrote it in 2 years for SoundCloud, then went back to Google. https://prometheus.io https://prometheus.io
- manojlds 8y agoWhy is the part that k8s uses it funny? That would have been one of the goals right? K8s is like lot of these projects except that it was created as a open source version of borg from within Google.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoIt’s funny because inside google borgmon is deprecated for new projects and has been since nine years at least. Of course google has stretched “deprecated” to its limits.
- QuercusMax 8y agoAs long as you don't have to write promethus configs in the horrendous borgmon language....
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoA lot more than just ex-FAANG folks would be stuck without the OSS technologies listed in the right column. I daresay, considering much of this software was authored by Xooglers or inspired by Google papers, that it's actually everyone else who would be stuck. The folks who have seen how these problems can be solved at scale would just reimplement the solutions, as indeed they have done.
- int_19h 8y agoWith Microsoft, this has changed substantially in the past decade, and there are many teams running entirely on public online services (GitHub, Azure DevOps, Travis etc) and with end-to-end open source tooling and dependencies. So it's much less of a technological bubble than it used to be. Probably less so than Google at this point. Can't say about Amazon.
- adamnemecek 8y agoWe literally talked about this this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092 Are people really still jerking about a company that's been around for like a 1/4 of a century?
- t0astbread 8y agoSure why not? And the linked article, while somewhat related has an entirely different message/purpose as this one.
- dietr1ch 8y agoHow it's the age relevant? I'd guess that the number of engineers and the size of the infrastructure used are far more relevant to just guess how interesting things are.
- wbl 8y agoI still have used an editor from a company far older than Google, and would love to learn what life was like on a Symbolics system or the dirty tricks of obsolete networks.
- quickthrower2 8y ago1/5 century
- sqs 8y agoSourcegraph CEO here. Cool to see we are listed as a CodeSearch alternative. We assembled some links to Google internal docs and studies about how they use their Google internal CodeSearch tool. See the links at the top of https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search if interested.
- tyingq 8y agoGreat list, and interesting for non-Googlers too. I'd replace, though: Google -> Real World free food -> :( With: free food -> free time
- QuercusMax 8y agoNot sure why you think free food is traded for free time. Free food helps me use my time at work more effectively. I usually have breakfast and lunch with teammates, and it's a mix of socialization and work-related conversations. Half an hour in the free cafe > 45-90 minutes going someplace to buy food.
- bloomer 8y agoSo do you get to go home 45-90 minutes earlier then? I think that is what the original comment was questioning.
- ddcompc 8y agoYou are treated like an adult so you "get to go home" whenever you choose to go home. Seriously, if you're working somewhere where people care what time you go home, you can really do better!
- jogjayr 8y agoMost software companies in the Bay Area have flexible time. Just like everywhere else, Google SWEs don't punch a clock. You go home when you feel you've done as much as you can for the day.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI'm jealous; my current job is billed by the hour, so I have to be able to describe every hour I've worked. Mind you that's usually a fixed 8 hour / day logged on project X, so having to write them down isn't a problem. But I can't go home early without feeling guilt; I mean I can, but that also means I have to do overtime sometime else in the month, to make sure the hours all check out at the end of the month.
- mdeeks 8y agoWhat does Google (or others) use for an intranet or team documentation? We're using Quip and it is just a black hole where documents go to die, never be seen again no matter how badly you want to find it.
- bauerd 8y agoCan't tell for Google, but Confluence is widely adopted (still I love to hate on it)
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThe challenge with Confluence - and all documentation systems for that matter - is that it needs a manager, someone who makes sure it's maintained, old / outdated pages get removed, the landing page is neat, and authors are encouraged to keep it updated. I can imagine that can quickly become a fulltime job though. Still, a formal role of documenter / archivist in a bigger software endeavour should be considered.
- bauerd 8y agoChallenge with Confluence for me in particular is that it overrides common keybindings, e.g. C-b in a textfield inserts a pair of asterisks instead of moving the caret backwards one character.
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- verst 8y agoIt used to be Google Sites (then part of Google Apps for Business which is now GSuite), Docs and Slides which were indexed by an internal Google search engine called MOMA (which I believe was powered by the Google Search Appliance, but my recollection on this last point is faint)
- bitskits 8y agoWithin Google there are several tools, but the most common (and IMO best) is markdown. (Docs is a close second.) Pros: Get's checked in like code, gets reviewed, and leaves a nice paper trial of edits. Cons: Doesn't invite comments/discussions as well as Docs does.
- fhrow4484 8y agoWhere AWS/GitHub is mentioned, there should be the equivalent Azure stuff, especially for bug tracking, CI/CD, repo subfolder "owners", code review, there's a ton of stuff equivalent or better to buganizer, OWNERS file, etc . In services there should be vitess since it's both a YouTube and an open source project. It seem to have a new transactional messaging feature with message sending and Ack: https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/ https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/, which seem to fill a slightly different niche than rabbitmq/pubsub/etc.
- draw_down 8y agoCool, go ahead and open a PR. It says they are welcomed.
- myroon5 8y agoI'd love to see this for other large tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft
- paxys 8y agoAn equivalent of this for Microsoft is pretty much impossible because there isn't one single way of doing any of these things at the company. Different departments/orgs/teams use different tools, some self-built and some off-the-shelf (including most of the stuff on this list).
- nickbarnwell 8y agoI can't speak to Amazon, but at Microsoft the equivalents to the Google offering are going to have the same OSS competitors. Having worked on services there, the only thing I really miss is Kusto; it's now available as an Azure service, but I'm at a company all in on AWS :(
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI like to think that most AWS services were initially developed internally to fulfill an Amazon internal need. But that might be optimistic.
- djtriptych 8y agoCame to find critique. Left disappointed :(
- sqs 8y agoWe (Sourcegraph) are interested in building an alternative to Critique at some point in the future, or at least enhancing existing code review tools to offer many of the favorite features of Critique. What are your favorite/must-have Critique features? (Also would love to jump on a video chat if you or anyone else is interested, and we could live-stream/share it on YouTube for others interested. Email me at sqs@sourcegraph.com if interested.)
- sa46 8y agoI left Google about a month ago and use Github now. Things I miss: - the ability to batch all comments in a single send. GitHub has the problem where replies are immediate and don’t necessarily represent the PR state. - built-in fixes and lints that show up as comments - the ability to diff between snapshots instead of losing all previous context every force push to a Github PR. - Github’s diff is really bad for code moving or changing indentation. - auto submit if tests pass and you have an lgtm. It’s frustrating having to wait for tests that will probably pass.
- sqs 8y agoThanks! GitHub actually does some of these things already. Do these solutions help/suffice? - Batching all comments in a single send: This is a core GitHub code review feature. You can send immediately by pressing the "Add single comment" button, but if you "Start a review", your comments are batched. - Built-in fixes and lints on the PR "Files changed" tab: GitHub Checks offer this, although not many teams have adopted it (that I'm aware of). - Changing indentation: The "Diff settings" menu has a "Hide whitespace changes" option, although it's not (afaik) possible to persist this. - Auto-submit if tests pass: The Refined GitHub browser extension offers this (https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github), kind of. You need to keep the page open in your browser while it finishes. Also, have you seen https://reviewable.io/ https://reviewable.io/ (made by an Xoogler) and does that appeal to you?
- noncoml 8y agoHate to be that guy, but why is this even in the front page, let alone #1?
- dstick 8y agoWell I guess I’m “that guy” who finds it highly interesting as an outsider with a very high interest in search. Never knew what tools Google’s using (never bothered to look it up either) and this list is a feast of “Aha!”’s for me :) Hopefully that answers your question ;-) Same as with a discussion about patents the other day. It’s fascinating to learn / read / understand how big businesses work as someone who’s never worked at one nor aspires to work at one, but does want to build one ;-)
- tomcam 8y agoJust winging it here, but maybe because these are some of the most influential companies on the face of the Earth, they employ tens of thousands of HN users, they are the envy of maybe half of all employees on the planet, their programming systems effect everyone reading HN, and many people here are genuinely interested in what happens at ginormous corporations that employ other hackers.
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- jaytaylor 8y agoIs there something comparable to the web-based IDE called Cider? Now that Amazon took cloud9 (c9.io) out of the market, it seems like there is a sizeable void. I want web-based Spacemacs or Evil! Or even just intelli-j.
- kajecounterhack 8y agoCloud9 is still there https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/?origin=c9io https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/?origin=c9io
- jaytaylor 8y agoNow with that AWS lock-in, no thanks. It only serves as a reminder of how early adopters get burned, similar though not as bad as the whole FoundationDB->Apple fiasco; that one affected me personally and drove home this lesson. I don't enjoy being the insect who claimed a tall blade of grass only to be mowed down first. If you value your time and value stability, don't use closed-core tools.
- oneweekwonder 8y agoThe experience is rough around the edges but there is the original cloud9v2 source code living on as pylon-ide? https://github.com/pylonide/pylon https://github.com/pylonide/pylon
- hopler 8y agoWhat is the lockin? What do you lose if you migrate your c9 to AWS c9?
- tsechin 8y agoI've tried Eclipse Che (listed in the article), and it's pretty good. I'm looking forward to Che switching its editor to Eclipse Theia, which promises to be "the VS Code experience in the browser".
- anton_kosyakov 8y agoYou should check out Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io https://www.gitpod.io). It was launched recently and provides disposable, ready-to-code development environments for GitHub projects: https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing-gitpod-frictionless-coding-on-github-397g https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing-gitpod-frictionless-... IDE is based on Theia (https://theia-ide.org https://theia-ide.org), i.e. VS Code with cloud-first mindset.
- mherdeg 8y agoI wonder how many of the we-left-Facebook-and-miss-it sorts of services don't have an obvious Google corollary (I'm thinking of Scuba/Honeycomb)
- simula67 8y agoIs there an alternative to BigTable which written in C or Go ?
- stingraycharles 8y agohttp://www.hypertable.org/ http://www.hypertable.org/ comes to mind. It's a BigTable implementation written in C++, it's fairly mature as well.
- simula67 8y agoThanks!
- puzzle 8y agoIf C++ is an option, Baidu has a clone called Tera.
- q3k 8y agoScyllaDB, which is basically a C++ Cassandra reimplementation, which in turn borrows a lot of design ideas from BT.
- dsl 8y agoI really wish they would add memegen to G Suite.
- alpb 8y agoDory is probably more realistic.
- dsl 8y agoDory is available now! If you go into presenter view in slides there is an option to launch it. It will put a short URL at the top of your presentation.
- alpb 8y agoIt’s not the same thing. Slides Q&A is a very poor implementation, and isn’t persistent. Doesn’t work while someone is not presenting. Not to mention, you don’t always need Slides to have people ask questions.
- antimora 8y agoAnything for Amazon tooling? For example, I see Pipelines could be replaced by CodeDeploy. I hear nix is similar to the brazil build system. Any other similar mapping by others?
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- malkia 8y agomaybe piper|citc -> VFSForGit
- smueller1234 8y agoThis is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is... optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other large companies' products with open source. For example protobuf is open source, but this makes it look like it isn't.
- puzzle 8y agoYeah, HDFS is a toy in comparison. It's barely comparable to the original GFS, which was retired... Almost a decade ago?
- alexhutcheson 8y agoIf you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general-purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?
- puzzle 8y agoCeph?
- q3k 8y agoCeph. Although it's slightly upside down with it's block / objects semantics (and as such, you don't exactly get the namespaced append-only semantics of Colossus), and doesn't depend on an excellent separate BigTable-like and Chubby-like layer underneath, instead rolling their own.
- romka2 8y agoThere is no listed equivalent of RecordIO. What do people use for high-reliability journals? When I needed something like RecordIO to store market data, I couldn't find anything. So I implemented https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO. I later learned of https://github.com/google/riegeli https://github.com/google/riegeli (work in progress), which could've saved me a lot of time if only I found it earlier. I think my ChunkIO is a better though.
- mempko 8y agoWould Riak's Bitcask format fit the bill here? https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf
- romka2 8y agoThis format looks somewhat underpowered. If one record is corrupted, there is no way to read anything after it. For the same reason there is no lookup/sharding support, such as finding the first record that starts in the second half of the file. If a writer crashes, a new instance of writer cannot append to an existing file without reading its whole content and truncating on the last readable record.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoThat appears to be exactly RecordIO. It even has transposition. Is there a reason that doesn't meet your requirements? Edit: it even includes an open source implementation of Cord, which they've renamed to Chain for some reason.
- romka2 8y ago> That appears to be exactly RecordIO. I suppose you mean "exactly" in a figurative way. Riegeli is definitely inspired by RecordIO and is meant as a successor to it but it's not RecordIO. > Is there a reason that doesn't meet your requirements? I need to store timeseries with fast lookup by timestamp. Riegeli doesn't support this out of the box. If I had discovered it before I built ChunkIO, I probably would've pulled the low-level code out of it and added timeseries support on top. Or maybe not. Reliability is very important to me and it's risky to use work-in-progress software that may or may not have any production footprint (I'm no longer with Google so I don't know if they use it internally.)