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I must be really awful at explaining my point or there's an awful lot of willful ignorance in this thread. Either way, something awful is going on. Read carefu

I must be really awful at explaining my point or there's an awful lot of willful ignorance in this thread. Either way, something awful is going on. Read carefully: the engineering culture of Google - it's practices, policies, principles, insiprations, and so on - did not make Go. The prior experiences of the Go authors, and a handful of specific and obvious influences, both of which are objectively not of Google, made Go. Google's engineering ethos does not get credit for Go, though maybe an argument can be made that their wallet gets credit. Personally, I don't agree with that, but it's beside the point.

akerl_ 6y ago
The part that I don’t understand is: why does Google not get credit, in your opinion, for having built an engineering org from qualified people? Google hired the engineers who made Go. A company’s engineering ethos is the combined ethos of its engineers. The Golang developers are engineers who Google hired. To attempt to draw a metaphor: if I operated an auto repair shop, and I wanted my shop’s “ethos” to be “we do high-quality repairs on cars”, one of the primary ways to do that would be to hire smart, already-experienced mechanics. And it would seem strange to me if people wrote blog posts saying that the work of those mechanics didn’t count towards my “ethos” because they were already good at their jobs; that’s why I hired them! As a tangential comment, phrases like “Read carefully” seem extraneous, as does the accusation of “an awful lot of willful ignorance”. They just serve as jabs at the other commenters here.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Go was principally made by 3 people, whose resumes basically justified being allowed to work at their discretion (this last bit is conjecture, but I would be surprised to be proven wrong). If Ken Thompson has a manager at Google that has any influence whatsoever on Ken's work, then Google's culture is more broken than I thought. The rest of Google is over 100,000 engineers who have managers, team leads, and much more rigid policies and workflows than I imagine the Go designers were ever subjected to during the development of Go. This is the engineering ethos to which I refer, not the system to which the Go designers where subject. So: Google gave a chair and a desk to a few talented people who applied experience and influences from entirely outside of Google to designing a programming language. In my book, Google doesn't get credit for that, and their engineering culture definitely doesn't get credit for that - it was barely involved, if at all.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    It seems like you’re making a couple of key assumptions about what the work environment looks like for the core Golang dev team, and then extrapolating from there to exclude them from your definition of Google’s “ethos”. Separately, the idea that a manager having influence on a good engineer’s work is “broken” is one I don’t understand. But I think, based on this comment thread, it’s unlikely we’re going to reach a consensus.
  - googthrowaway42 6y ago
    FWIW I am an ex-Googler and I agree with you. The principal authors of Go are not really Googlers in the sense that other "mere mortals" are. Their engineering skills, practices, and decisions are not informed or subject to the strictures of the wider culture at Google.
    - akerl_ 6y ago
      To help me understand, can you give an example of the kind of stricture that applied to other engineers but not to the Golang core team?
      - googthrowaway42 6y ago
        Rob Pike and Ken Thompson have Sundar as their manager (I saw this at least with other Google Fellows) and don't go through perf in any real sense if they actually do have a perf process which I doubt they do. They do whatever they want and set their own agendas. At Google seniority is revered. It's very strict in that sense so I literally cannot imagine someone "overruling" or mounting any serious opposition to Pike or Thompson on anything. Edit: They're not actually fellows it's been pointed out but high ranking ICs like that do have a lot of respect within Google and are treated deferentially, especially famous ones just based on my own experience with high ranking ICs.
        akerl_ 6y ago
        I’m not sure I understand your examples. You note that they don’t go through any sort of performance review process, but your subsequent sentence suggests you don’t really have visibility into whether that’s the case? And then you point out that as senior engineers, you can’t imagine anybody opposing things they say. Do you have an actual example of ways in which their treatment by Google differs from other engineers? These seem like conjecture about what their work experience is like.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > if I operated an auto repair shop, and I wanted my shop's "ethos" to be "we do high-quality repairs on cars", one of the primary ways to do that would be to hire smart, already-experienced mechanics. And it would seem strange to me if people wrote blog posts saying that the work of those mechanics didn't count towards my "ethos" because they were already good at their jobs; that's why I hired them! FWIW, that doesn't seem strange to me. Hiring smart, already-experienced mechanics is a input to your ethos; presumably you hope that they will make the shop's culture better-suited to doing high-quality repairs. A example of a output of that culture would be if you also hired young, inexperienced mechanics, and they learned (presumably from their aforementioned seniors) to do high-quality repairs and went on to be the next generation's smart, already-experienced mechanics.

akerl_ 6y ago

The part that I don’t understand is: why does Google not get credit, in your opinion, for having built an engineering org from qualified people? Google hired the engineers who made Go. A company’s engineering ethos is the combined ethos of its engineers. The Golang developers are engineers who Google hired. To attempt to draw a metaphor: if I operated an auto repair shop, and I wanted my shop’s “ethos” to be “we do high-quality repairs on cars”, one of the primary ways to do that would be to hire smart, already-experienced mechanics. And it would seem strange to me if people wrote blog posts saying that the work of those mechanics didn’t count towards my “ethos” because they were already good at their jobs; that’s why I hired them! As a tangential comment, phrases like “Read carefully” seem extraneous, as does the accusation of “an awful lot of willful ignorance”. They just serve as jabs at the other commenters here.

ddevault 6y ago
Go was principally made by 3 people, whose resumes basically justified being allowed to work at their discretion (this last bit is conjecture, but I would be surprised to be proven wrong). If Ken Thompson has a manager at Google that has any influence whatsoever on Ken's work, then Google's culture is more broken than I thought. The rest of Google is over 100,000 engineers who have managers, team leads, and much more rigid policies and workflows than I imagine the Go designers were ever subjected to during the development of Go. This is the engineering ethos to which I refer, not the system to which the Go designers where subject. So: Google gave a chair and a desk to a few talented people who applied experience and influences from entirely outside of Google to designing a programming language. In my book, Google doesn't get credit for that, and their engineering culture definitely doesn't get credit for that - it was barely involved, if at all.
- akerl_ 6y ago
  It seems like you’re making a couple of key assumptions about what the work environment looks like for the core Golang dev team, and then extrapolating from there to exclude them from your definition of Google’s “ethos”. Separately, the idea that a manager having influence on a good engineer’s work is “broken” is one I don’t understand. But I think, based on this comment thread, it’s unlikely we’re going to reach a consensus.
- googthrowaway42 6y ago
  FWIW I am an ex-Googler and I agree with you. The principal authors of Go are not really Googlers in the sense that other "mere mortals" are. Their engineering skills, practices, and decisions are not informed or subject to the strictures of the wider culture at Google.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    To help me understand, can you give an example of the kind of stricture that applied to other engineers but not to the Golang core team?
    - googthrowaway42 6y ago
      Rob Pike and Ken Thompson have Sundar as their manager (I saw this at least with other Google Fellows) and don't go through perf in any real sense if they actually do have a perf process which I doubt they do. They do whatever they want and set their own agendas. At Google seniority is revered. It's very strict in that sense so I literally cannot imagine someone "overruling" or mounting any serious opposition to Pike or Thompson on anything. Edit: They're not actually fellows it's been pointed out but high ranking ICs like that do have a lot of respect within Google and are treated deferentially, especially famous ones just based on my own experience with high ranking ICs.
      - akerl_ 6y ago
        I’m not sure I understand your examples. You note that they don’t go through any sort of performance review process, but your subsequent sentence suggests you don’t really have visibility into whether that’s the case? And then you point out that as senior engineers, you can’t imagine anybody opposing things they say. Do you have an actual example of ways in which their treatment by Google differs from other engineers? These seem like conjecture about what their work experience is like.
a1369209993 6y ago
> if I operated an auto repair shop, and I wanted my shop's "ethos" to be "we do high-quality repairs on cars", one of the primary ways to do that would be to hire smart, already-experienced mechanics. And it would seem strange to me if people wrote blog posts saying that the work of those mechanics didn't count towards my "ethos" because they were already good at their jobs; that's why I hired them! FWIW, that doesn't seem strange to me. Hiring smart, already-experienced mechanics is a input to your ethos; presumably you hope that they will make the shop's culture better-suited to doing high-quality repairs. A example of a output of that culture would be if you also hired young, inexperienced mechanics, and they learned (presumably from their aforementioned seniors) to do high-quality repairs and went on to be the next generation's smart, already-experienced mechanics.