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> Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers I like this way of measuring extra work.

> Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers I like this way of measuring extra work. Is this standard at Google?

whazor 2y ago
I think this means the engineer fuzzes 4 projects?
- colejohnson66 2y ago
  It means it costs them three months per year per employee. So, 'n' employees, n/4 years of man-power is spent fixing issues found by fuzzing. As others have said, FTE (full-time equivalent) is the more common name.
adam_gyroscope 2y ago
Yep, often things are measured in FTE or FTE-equivalent units. It’s not precise of course but is a reasonable shorthand for the amount of work required.
nairb774 2y ago
FTE. Full time equivalent. Mosts costs are denominated in FTE - headcount as well as things like CPU/memory/storage/... The main economic unit for most engineers is FTE not $.
- sanbor 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure FTE stands for full-time employee
  - jdlshore 2y ago
    When used to compare costs, “equivalent” is used instead of “employee.” “The cost of one full-time employee is equivalent to X CPUs.” —> “The full-time equivalent is X CPUs.”
kiicia 2y ago
Yes, all those well paid C-level managers cannot handle multiple units so they require everyone to use one “easy to understand unit so that everything is easy to compare and micromanage”
- Someone 2y ago
  If you want to decide which of several options is better, how do you propose doing that without using a single number? You can’t, in general, compare multi dimensional quantities.
  - kiicia 2y ago
    I never said that idea of using single number is bad in itself, what is bad is forcing this single number and it's calculation on everyone else like it is some biblical revelation instead of calculating it ad-hoc (and modifying calculation as need requires), I can only hope c-suites can add and multiply as for if you can compare multidimensional quantities - of course you can do it and it is done every day with engineering and medical data, it's just tad more complicated than adding and multiplying so it's a no-go for c-suite you cannot expect people earning six figures to understand actual math, can you?
- MForster 2y ago
  It's quite the opposite. This is intended for engineers to make good trade-off decisions as a rule of thumb without financial micromanaging.
pradn 2y ago
Yes, a SWE-year is a common unit of cost. And there are internal calculators that tell you how much CPU, memory, network etc a SWE-year gets you. Same for other internal units, like the cost of a particular DB. This allows you to make time/resource tradeoffs. Spending half an engineer’s year to save 0.5 SWE-y of CPU is not a great ROI. But if you get 10 SWE out of it, it’s probably a great idea. I personally have used it to argue that we shouldn’t spend 2 weeks of engineering time to save a TB of DB disk space. The cost of the disk comes to less than a SWE-hour per year!
- jorvi 2y ago
  Note that this can lead to horrid economics for the user. An example being Google unilaterally flipping on VP8/VP9 decode, which at that time purely decoded on the CPU or experimentally on the GPU. It saved Google a few CPU cycles and some bandwidth but it nuked every user's CPU and battery. And the amount of energy YouTube consumed wholesale (so servers + clients) skyrocketed. Tragedy of the Commons.
  - crazysim 2y ago
    It also saved licensing costs to MPEG-LA too I guess.
    - ksec 2y ago
      They still have to pay for H.264 and the cost of it are peanuts.
  - okeuro49 2y ago
    Do you have an article about this? What is the state now?
    - izacus 2y ago
      Pretty much every device these days decodes VP9 in hardware. It's been a long time since I've seen a VP8 video on YT, so I'd assume it's not even used anymore due to worse compression.
summerlight 2y ago
Yeap, kinds of. It's preferred because whenever you propose/evaluate some changes, you can have a rough idea whether it was worth the time. Like you worked on some significant optimization then measure it and justify like the saving was 10 SWE-years where you just put 1 SWE-quarter.
fph 2y ago
Technically a measure of power, work/time.
h3half 2y ago
This is also extremely extremely common in engineering services contracts, both for government and private sector contracting. RFPs (or their equivalent) will specifically lay out what level of effort is expected and will often denote effort in terms of FTE

> Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers I like this way of measuring extra work. Is this standard at Google?

whazor 2y ago

I think this means the engineer fuzzes 4 projects?

colejohnson66 2y ago
It means it costs them three months per year per employee. So, 'n' employees, n/4 years of man-power is spent fixing issues found by fuzzing. As others have said, FTE (full-time equivalent) is the more common name.

adam_gyroscope 2y ago

Yep, often things are measured in FTE or FTE-equivalent units. It’s not precise of course but is a reasonable shorthand for the amount of work required.

nairb774 2y ago

FTE. Full time equivalent. Mosts costs are denominated in FTE - headcount as well as things like CPU/memory/storage/... The main economic unit for most engineers is FTE not $.

sanbor 2y ago
I’m pretty sure FTE stands for full-time employee
- jdlshore 2y ago
  When used to compare costs, “equivalent” is used instead of “employee.” “The cost of one full-time employee is equivalent to X CPUs.” —> “The full-time equivalent is X CPUs.”

kiicia 2y ago

Yes, all those well paid C-level managers cannot handle multiple units so they require everyone to use one “easy to understand unit so that everything is easy to compare and micromanage”

Someone 2y ago
If you want to decide which of several options is better, how do you propose doing that without using a single number? You can’t, in general, compare multi dimensional quantities.
- kiicia 2y ago
  I never said that idea of using single number is bad in itself, what is bad is forcing this single number and it's calculation on everyone else like it is some biblical revelation instead of calculating it ad-hoc (and modifying calculation as need requires), I can only hope c-suites can add and multiply as for if you can compare multidimensional quantities - of course you can do it and it is done every day with engineering and medical data, it's just tad more complicated than adding and multiplying so it's a no-go for c-suite you cannot expect people earning six figures to understand actual math, can you?
MForster 2y ago
It's quite the opposite. This is intended for engineers to make good trade-off decisions as a rule of thumb without financial micromanaging.

pradn 2y ago

Yes, a SWE-year is a common unit of cost. And there are internal calculators that tell you how much CPU, memory, network etc a SWE-year gets you. Same for other internal units, like the cost of a particular DB. This allows you to make time/resource tradeoffs. Spending half an engineer’s year to save 0.5 SWE-y of CPU is not a great ROI. But if you get 10 SWE out of it, it’s probably a great idea. I personally have used it to argue that we shouldn’t spend 2 weeks of engineering time to save a TB of DB disk space. The cost of the disk comes to less than a SWE-hour per year!

jorvi 2y ago
Note that this can lead to horrid economics for the user. An example being Google unilaterally flipping on VP8/VP9 decode, which at that time purely decoded on the CPU or experimentally on the GPU. It saved Google a few CPU cycles and some bandwidth but it nuked every user's CPU and battery. And the amount of energy YouTube consumed wholesale (so servers + clients) skyrocketed. Tragedy of the Commons.
- crazysim 2y ago
  It also saved licensing costs to MPEG-LA too I guess.
  - ksec 2y ago
    They still have to pay for H.264 and the cost of it are peanuts.
- okeuro49 2y ago
  Do you have an article about this? What is the state now?
  - izacus 2y ago
    Pretty much every device these days decodes VP9 in hardware. It's been a long time since I've seen a VP8 video on YT, so I'd assume it's not even used anymore due to worse compression.

summerlight 2y ago

Yeap, kinds of. It's preferred because whenever you propose/evaluate some changes, you can have a rough idea whether it was worth the time. Like you worked on some significant optimization then measure it and justify like the saving was 10 SWE-years where you just put 1 SWE-quarter.

fph 2y ago

Technically a measure of power, work/time.

h3half 2y ago

This is also extremely extremely common in engineering services contracts, both for government and private sector contracting. RFPs (or their equivalent) will specifically lay out what level of effort is expected and will often denote effort in terms of FTE