4 ms·

I’d honestly read a book about these anecdotes. Do you have more?

dekhn 4y ago
better to join google and go through all the internal history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old timers. The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.
- sergiomattei 4y ago
  Time to apply! ;)
dekhn 4y ago
Here's another. After working in Ads for a while somehow I convinced senior management to let me use all the idle cycles in prod. I spent the next three years building and running the equivalent of Folding@Home at scale (the largest number I'm allowed to share is that we used more than 700K Xeon cores 24/7 to run protein folding, drug design, and telescope simulations). We published a few high profile papers and then I shut down the project because it was using far too much energy and it made sense to free the resource up for more important projects.
dekhn 4y ago
How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many mornings. I told them how I thought Google could contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.
- sergiomattei 4y ago
  What! That’s crazy. Is your background in biology or genomics? How’d you grow an interest towards these topics?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    yes, my training is in biology and it came about because I thought that biology would be more interesting to hack than computers (all this happened when I was in middle school and high school, hacking on the internet and taking biology classes). It's like being put in front of a magical new computer and being told "we have this thing in the lab, we don't know how it works, so can you sort of play with it and tell us how?" But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
    - sergiomattei 4y ago
      That's an interesting career turn. Thank you for these stories from a younger engineer just starting out. :)

better to join google and go through all the internal history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old timers. The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.

sergiomattei 4y ago
Time to apply! ;)

dekhn 4y ago

Here's another. After working in Ads for a while somehow I convinced senior management to let me use all the idle cycles in prod. I spent the next three years building and running the equivalent of Folding@Home at scale (the largest number I'm allowed to share is that we used more than 700K Xeon cores 24/7 to run protein folding, drug design, and telescope simulations). We published a few high profile papers and then I shut down the project because it was using far too much energy and it made sense to free the resource up for more important projects.

dekhn 4y ago

How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many mornings. I told them how I thought Google could contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.

sergiomattei 4y ago
What! That’s crazy. Is your background in biology or genomics? How’d you grow an interest towards these topics?
- dekhn 4y ago
  yes, my training is in biology and it came about because I thought that biology would be more interesting to hack than computers (all this happened when I was in middle school and high school, hacking on the internet and taking biology classes). It's like being put in front of a magical new computer and being told "we have this thing in the lab, we don't know how it works, so can you sort of play with it and tell us how?" But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
  - sergiomattei 4y ago
    That's an interesting career turn. Thank you for these stories from a younger engineer just starting out. :)