18 ms·

The harsh truth of working at Google is that in the end you are moving protobufs from one place to another. They have the most talented people in the world but

The harsh truth of working at Google is that in the end you are moving protobufs from one place to another. They have the most talented people in the world but those people still have to do some boring engineering work.

rossjudson 7y ago
Can you believe that people at Google still have to, like, eat lunch and stuff? And talk to each other? The coffee is the same damn color every day too. Maybe there's a place, somewhere, for the purest-of-the-pure non-boringest thoughts.
izacus 7y ago
But you can reduce any job to this can't you? Pretty much all engineering is just moving some strings around.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Work in finance and you can move integers around!
  - have_faith 7y ago
    Work in the news industry and you can flip booleans! (too subtle?)
    - skolsuper 7y ago
      !(!(fake news))
    - ci5er 7y ago
      > (too subtle?) It was for me! :-) (Of course, because it's after 5pm somewhere, I'm unfortunately already lit)
duality 7y ago
What is the right data format to move around? JSON?
- Xorlev 7y ago
  It's just a saying. All we do is move protos from one service to another. JSON is definitely not the right stuff.
  - dmoy 7y ago
    The encoding/decoding cost is painful :( I mean in this context if you're doing that level of scale. For a lot of purposes json is totally fine.
    - isatty 7y ago
      It's really not - compared to the wire cost/static type checks and loads of other stuff you give up.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  The point is you're writing mostly business logic and glue. You get a server request, you transform it with some logic, call some other servers, combine the responses and run some more logic, and return a response. The scalability and interesting work has been factored out and handed off to infrastructure teams that build stuff like this auth framework, load balancers, highly scalable databases, data center cluster management tools, etc. Which really is the smart way to do it. To the extent that you can stand on the shoulders of giants who've basically made scalability the default, you are free to focus on what you're actually trying to build. The only downside is if all the interesting engineering challenges are already solved for you, the remainder might not that be that interesting to people who enjoy engineering challenges.
unixhero 7y ago
Sandstorm.io kentonv protobufs?
- kentonv 7y ago
  Oh hai, you rang? Sandstorm.io doesn't use protobuf, it uses Cap'n Proto, which was designed to replace protobuf. Fun fact: The Zanzibar project was started in ~2011 specifically to replace my main project at the time, which was trying to solve the same problems. Apparently, some senior engineers felt letting me work on core infrastructure was too dangerous. They succeeded in turning my project into a lame duck and making me quit, which is when I then started working on Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.io. In retrospect I'm glad it happened. Yeah... Google is not always the most fun place to work on big infrastructure projects.
yegle 7y ago
"Larry&Sergey Protobuf Moving Co."
- gniv 7y ago
  https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b777f994326fa91fa509ca1238ea6d88 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b777f994326fa91fa509ca...

rossjudson 7y ago

Can you believe that people at Google still have to, like, eat lunch and stuff? And talk to each other? The coffee is the same damn color every day too. Maybe there's a place, somewhere, for the purest-of-the-pure non-boringest thoughts.

izacus 7y ago

But you can reduce any job to this can't you? Pretty much all engineering is just moving some strings around.

jjeaff 7y ago
Work in finance and you can move integers around!
- have_faith 7y ago
  Work in the news industry and you can flip booleans! (too subtle?)
  - skolsuper 7y ago
    !(!(fake news))
  - ci5er 7y ago
    > (too subtle?) It was for me! :-) (Of course, because it's after 5pm somewhere, I'm unfortunately already lit)

duality 7y ago

What is the right data format to move around? JSON?

Xorlev 7y ago
It's just a saying. All we do is move protos from one service to another. JSON is definitely not the right stuff.
- dmoy 7y ago
  The encoding/decoding cost is painful :( I mean in this context if you're doing that level of scale. For a lot of purposes json is totally fine.
  - isatty 7y ago
    It's really not - compared to the wire cost/static type checks and loads of other stuff you give up.
adrianmonk 7y ago
The point is you're writing mostly business logic and glue. You get a server request, you transform it with some logic, call some other servers, combine the responses and run some more logic, and return a response. The scalability and interesting work has been factored out and handed off to infrastructure teams that build stuff like this auth framework, load balancers, highly scalable databases, data center cluster management tools, etc. Which really is the smart way to do it. To the extent that you can stand on the shoulders of giants who've basically made scalability the default, you are free to focus on what you're actually trying to build. The only downside is if all the interesting engineering challenges are already solved for you, the remainder might not that be that interesting to people who enjoy engineering challenges.

unixhero 7y ago

Sandstorm.io kentonv protobufs?

kentonv 7y ago
Oh hai, you rang? Sandstorm.io doesn't use protobuf, it uses Cap'n Proto, which was designed to replace protobuf. Fun fact: The Zanzibar project was started in ~2011 specifically to replace my main project at the time, which was trying to solve the same problems. Apparently, some senior engineers felt letting me work on core infrastructure was too dangerous. They succeeded in turning my project into a lame duck and making me quit, which is when I then started working on Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.io. In retrospect I'm glad it happened. Yeah... Google is not always the most fun place to work on big infrastructure projects.

yegle 7y ago

"Larry&Sergey Protobuf Moving Co."

gniv 7y ago
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b777f994326fa91fa509ca1238ea6d88 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b777f994326fa91fa509ca...