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(former Googler) It was really special to see how this pair basically laid out the foundations of large-scale distributed computing. Protobufs, huge parts of t

(former Googler) It was really special to see how this pair basically laid out the foundations of large-scale distributed computing. Protobufs, huge parts of the search stack, GFS, MapReduce, BigTable... the list goes on. They are the only two people at Google at level 11 (senior fellow) on a scale that goes from 3 (fresh grad) to 10 (fellow).

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
(current Googler) One of my coworkers got assigned Sanjay on one of her CLs recently and she had no idea who he was. I had the pleasure of working with Sanjay as his intern at SRC the summer before he joined Google, and he taught be a lot of cool tricks related to compiler development. Both Sanjay and Jeff Dean are PhDs with PL focuses.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  hah, this happened to me recently. I submitted a small CL to a threading lib and suddenly I see some guy named "sanjay" asking for a small change. It's very cool to see how involved he is still!
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of the dynamic optimization techniques that made it into HotSpot. Much of the HotSpot team itself was hired by Google, notably former Search SVP Ben Gomes and several less famous employees. The Plan 9 team (notably Ken Thompson and Rob Pike) went on to create Sawzall and then Go within Google; Ken Thompson was himself famous for creating C before then. Guido van Rossum (Python's creator) wrote Mondrian, the first code-review tool in Google. Lars Bak worked on BETA, then joined Urs to work on Self and Strongtalk before implementing the first version of V8 at Google. Dan Sugalski of Parrot & Perl 6 fame has held a bunch of infrastructure rules within Google. It's like nearly everyone in a who's-who of the language design & compiler implementation community circa 2002 ended up working for Google, and the few that didn't (notably Chris Lattner of LLVM and Slava Pestov of Factor) ended up at Apple. [1] https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/pubs/jdean-thesis.html https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ceci... [2] https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-parallel-pipelines/ https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-p...
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    And now they can't even build a chat app. So sad how much Google has fallen. That's why research and product should be separate.
    - woooooo 2y ago
      They built a ton of stuff after those researchers were hired, including original gchat. They stopped being able to build a chat app after different people were hired.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      IMHO most of Google's woes stem from the promotion system. The incentive is to launch, promote, replace so you can get other people promoted. There's basically zero incentive to build anything durable because if you do, it means your people won't get promoted, they'll leave, your headcount will disappear, and eventually you'll find yourself marginalized and forced out.
    - wildrhythms 2y ago
      I think it's happening at every tech company. They are now being led by tech-illiterate company hopping businesspeople rather than passionate engineers.
mgaunard 2y ago
Let's not exaggerate. Everything they did was already well-established in academia for decades and what they built was pretty dumbed-down rather than novel, at least conceptually. Sure, they did good engineering to apply those techniques at Google, but they did not "lay out the foundations of large scale distributed computing".
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  Academia lags quite a bit behind industry when it comes to software engineering.
  - mgaunard 2y ago
    That's because academia doesn't actually do software engineering, it does computer science.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

(current Googler) One of my coworkers got assigned Sanjay on one of her CLs recently and she had no idea who he was. I had the pleasure of working with Sanjay as his intern at SRC the summer before he joined Google, and he taught be a lot of cool tricks related to compiler development. Both Sanjay and Jeff Dean are PhDs with PL focuses.

VirusNewbie 2y ago
hah, this happened to me recently. I submitted a small CL to a threading lib and suddenly I see some guy named "sanjay" asking for a small change. It's very cool to see how involved he is still!
nostrademons 2y ago
It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of the dynamic optimization techniques that made it into HotSpot. Much of the HotSpot team itself was hired by Google, notably former Search SVP Ben Gomes and several less famous employees. The Plan 9 team (notably Ken Thompson and Rob Pike) went on to create Sawzall and then Go within Google; Ken Thompson was himself famous for creating C before then. Guido van Rossum (Python's creator) wrote Mondrian, the first code-review tool in Google. Lars Bak worked on BETA, then joined Urs to work on Self and Strongtalk before implementing the first version of V8 at Google. Dan Sugalski of Parrot & Perl 6 fame has held a bunch of infrastructure rules within Google. It's like nearly everyone in a who's-who of the language design & compiler implementation community circa 2002 ended up working for Google, and the few that didn't (notably Chris Lattner of LLVM and Slava Pestov of Factor) ended up at Apple. [1] https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/pubs/jdean-thesis.html https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ceci... [2] https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-parallel-pipelines/ https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-p...
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  And now they can't even build a chat app. So sad how much Google has fallen. That's why research and product should be separate.
  - woooooo 2y ago
    They built a ton of stuff after those researchers were hired, including original gchat. They stopped being able to build a chat app after different people were hired.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    IMHO most of Google's woes stem from the promotion system. The incentive is to launch, promote, replace so you can get other people promoted. There's basically zero incentive to build anything durable because if you do, it means your people won't get promoted, they'll leave, your headcount will disappear, and eventually you'll find yourself marginalized and forced out.
  - wildrhythms 2y ago
    I think it's happening at every tech company. They are now being led by tech-illiterate company hopping businesspeople rather than passionate engineers.

mgaunard 2y ago

Let's not exaggerate. Everything they did was already well-established in academia for decades and what they built was pretty dumbed-down rather than novel, at least conceptually. Sure, they did good engineering to apply those techniques at Google, but they did not "lay out the foundations of large scale distributed computing".

VirusNewbie 2y ago
Academia lags quite a bit behind industry when it comes to software engineering.
- mgaunard 2y ago
  That's because academia doesn't actually do software engineering, it does computer science.