4 ms·

One of the stories I provided for the documentary that didn’t make it (but is one of my favorites) relates to an early 2015 discussion I had with Brian Grant (g

One of the stories I provided for the documentary that didn’t make it (but is one of my favorites) relates to an early 2015 discussion I had with Brian Grant (googler / architect / worked on Omega / also in the documentary). Brian writes very succinct and clear descriptions of problems encountered inside google, breaks them down to “what worked, what didn’t work”, and then would summarize a design seed in a github comment (of which several such subsystems subsequently were implemented that have been fairly successful). I would keep mental track of some of these comments and assign a score based on how much R&D investment at google was compressed into a 200-300 word comment. I guesstimated some at being valued at upwards of $100k a word, and jokingly asked brian if he was authorized to share $10M worth of google’s secret sauce. He laughed, but reminded me of some of the same things mentioned in the documentary (which we all knew in the project at the time) - paraphrased: “if you can seed a community project that includes some of these patterns built on that research, and that enables $10 billion of application team value, and google can capture $1B of that in google cloud, that’s a pretty good return on investment.” And definitely among the key contributors I worked with from google was the very human and very relatable (for HN) desire to build that shows those internal ideas off and “do a successor to borg that really takes what we’ve learned and doesn’t just copy it”. Even if it was a business strategy to help catch google cloud up… the beauty of open source is that you can benefit from it regardless, and it moves the industry forward in a meaningful way.

potamic 5y ago
> Brian writes very succinct and clear descriptions of problems encountered inside google, breaks them down to “what worked, what didn’t work”, and then would summarize a design seed in a github comment (of which several such subsystems subsequently were implemented that have been fairly successful). I would keep mental track of some of these comments and assign a score based on how much R&D investment at google was compressed into a 200-300 word comment Most places I have seen, architects seem to spend most of their time writing out overly verbose documents, detailed specifications, making presentations etc etc. There is pressure to show you are in charge of the project and accountable for it so you end up with all these ceremonies where you create heaps of content and dump it onto the teams. Whereas the sort of situation you described is really where the role of an architect shines, in making sense of the chaos and showing light to the teams. You often don't need more than a short message or a brief meeting to convey these ideas, but such things don't lend upward visibility to what you're doing. I've always wondered if the life of an architect in Google involves these things or is quite different from most organizations?

potamic 5y ago

> Brian writes very succinct and clear descriptions of problems encountered inside google, breaks them down to “what worked, what didn’t work”, and then would summarize a design seed in a github comment (of which several such subsystems subsequently were implemented that have been fairly successful). I would keep mental track of some of these comments and assign a score based on how much R&D investment at google was compressed into a 200-300 word comment Most places I have seen, architects seem to spend most of their time writing out overly verbose documents, detailed specifications, making presentations etc etc. There is pressure to show you are in charge of the project and accountable for it so you end up with all these ceremonies where you create heaps of content and dump it onto the teams. Whereas the sort of situation you described is really where the role of an architect shines, in making sense of the chaos and showing light to the teams. You often don't need more than a short message or a brief meeting to convey these ideas, but such things don't lend upward visibility to what you're doing. I've always wondered if the life of an architect in Google involves these things or is quite different from most organizations?