4 ms·

>most tools are exactly the same sort of thing that you'd create in any other place, we just have more of them Why? Why reinvent the wheel 10 times?

danpalmer 3y ago
Most engineers create tools, Google is not special in that way. But even when there's a similar open-source tool, it may be difficult to integrate with internal systems. There's a lot of benefit to a consistent set of technologies (data formats, storage systems, etc) so that's often a reason to write internally. There is a lot of open source software in use at Google so I wouldn't say there's a lot of reinventing the wheel. And when there is an internal clone, the requirements are often necessarily different enough to warrant writing an internal version.
asoneth 3y ago
I did not interpret their statement as meaning they have many variants of the same tool, but that they have tools that cover a wider variety of situations. I found the same thing moving from a very large company to a smallish company. Both had good tooling, the latter just had significantly less and there were gaps in coverage. Whenever I encountered one of those areas I often found myself wishing I had access to some niche tool I had gotten used to at my prior company.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Google has 180,000 employees. There's an org that is responsible for internal tooling, but they are an org with priorities and challenges like any other. So sometimes Search needs a thing and Core won't do it so some people in Search build a tool. Maybe later somebody in Ads needs a similar tool but has never heard of the thing that Search built. So there is an organic force to this sort of complexity. There are systems to resist this and people whose whole job is to focus on unifying systems, but they aren't perfect. In general, I'd say that Google is way way way more uniform than most other companies because of the monorepo, centralized tooling, and (mostly) uniform development process across the company.
- aatd86 3y ago
  Should be easy nowadays to have a chat-based AI which, given some provided requirements, suggest similar tools that have been built by other SBUs. Even if only to look at the code.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Maybe. But this only solves a visibility issue (and codesearch/moma is already pretty good at this). It doesn't help you when the tool supports a different language or the team that owns it isn't willing to commit to the SLO that you need or whatever.
lokar 3y ago
In many cases there was no wheel available at the time

danpalmer 3y ago

Most engineers create tools, Google is not special in that way. But even when there's a similar open-source tool, it may be difficult to integrate with internal systems. There's a lot of benefit to a consistent set of technologies (data formats, storage systems, etc) so that's often a reason to write internally. There is a lot of open source software in use at Google so I wouldn't say there's a lot of reinventing the wheel. And when there is an internal clone, the requirements are often necessarily different enough to warrant writing an internal version.

asoneth 3y ago

I did not interpret their statement as meaning they have many variants of the same tool, but that they have tools that cover a wider variety of situations. I found the same thing moving from a very large company to a smallish company. Both had good tooling, the latter just had significantly less and there were gaps in coverage. Whenever I encountered one of those areas I often found myself wishing I had access to some niche tool I had gotten used to at my prior company.

UncleMeat 3y ago

Google has 180,000 employees. There's an org that is responsible for internal tooling, but they are an org with priorities and challenges like any other. So sometimes Search needs a thing and Core won't do it so some people in Search build a tool. Maybe later somebody in Ads needs a similar tool but has never heard of the thing that Search built. So there is an organic force to this sort of complexity. There are systems to resist this and people whose whole job is to focus on unifying systems, but they aren't perfect. In general, I'd say that Google is way way way more uniform than most other companies because of the monorepo, centralized tooling, and (mostly) uniform development process across the company.

aatd86 3y ago
Should be easy nowadays to have a chat-based AI which, given some provided requirements, suggest similar tools that have been built by other SBUs. Even if only to look at the code.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Maybe. But this only solves a visibility issue (and codesearch/moma is already pretty good at this). It doesn't help you when the tool supports a different language or the team that owns it isn't willing to commit to the SLO that you need or whatever.

lokar 3y ago

In many cases there was no wheel available at the time