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It's funny. The main reason I'd want to work at Google is to have access to their scale of infrastructure. OTOH, they'd have to be insane to just give random n
by JabavuAdams 16y ago
It's funny. The main reason I'd want to work at Google is to have access to their scale of infrastructure.
OTOH, they'd have to be insane to just give random new hires free access to their infrastructure.
So, if you've got some computing problems that would benefit from scale or data, maybe the best route is to get a proof-of-concept working on EC2, and then try to collaborate with Googlers.
This is distinct from the startup->Gacquisitionoogle route, since I'm more interested in projects than companies (except my on co.)
- nostrademons 16y agoRandom new hires have free access to their infrastructure, except for private user data. (For some reason, this always surprises people in interviews - I know I was surprised when my interviewer said "Oh, it's no big deal if you want to grab 2000 machines or so and run a MapReduce" - but it's not exactly confidential, most interviewers will tell you if you ask, and we basically think nothing of it.) There are safeguards in place to make sure experimental jobs don't stomp on production critical ones.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoInteresting, thanks! What if one wanted to run a compute-heavy job with enough machines to give access to say 10 TB of RAM? The idea would be to do a few hours of actual computation over a few days of clock time. I'll have to think about whether I can phrase this as a MapReduce problem. Unfortunately it's a side-project, so I can't spare many cycles for it.
- nostrademons 16y agoI'm doing that right now.
- harryh 16y agoRandom new hires do have basically free access to their infrastructure. It's one of the best parts about working there. -harryh, googler from 2004-2009