9 ms·

Acquisition and maintenance of a band of minions

95 points by ericedge 13y ago

smurph 13y ago
In my experience, this is how the big defense contractors approach software. They will gravitate towards the most expensive proprietary tools in hopes that their engineers will pigeon hole themselves into that environment. I honestly had people tell me that I wasn't allowed to use anything open source (even through the military uses open source all the time) and that ClearCase is the most dominant version control system in the software industry.
epochwolf 13y ago
In case anyone missed it, she's talking about Google. :)
- yareally 13y ago
  I think you're reading way too far into it being about a specific company. A number of companies people love to like/hate could fall into the specifics she lists, depending on one's views. It's like a crystal ball or clouds in the sky--one sees what they wish to see. Guessing the actual company, if there is one, is kind of disingenuous to the article's message itself though, since it is good depiction of the "ideal" company most of us would want to avoid.
  - sses 13y ago
    Context is everything here. There may be a number of companies that fit the pattern, and she could be speaking hypothetically, but Rachel worked at Google and has an axe to grind.
  - epochwolf 13y ago
    My assumption is based on the author's previous writings. While it can be applied to many companies, google is the best fit for companies she has talked about.
- fredley 13y ago
  Not really. All of this can be applied to almost any bank, accountancy firm or large corporate's graduate recruitment strategy.
- mixedbit 13y ago
  If so, it is rather only her impression of Google. For any company that creates technically challenging products, senior hires should be (and most often are) vital.
  - epochwolf 13y ago
    It is only her impression. :)
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Is this a common reaction to working at Google?
  - jsolson 13y ago
    Not in my experience, no. If nothing else, almost everyone I work with is on their second or third career. I'm possibly the youngest guy on my team, and I'm 30. That said, I work out of the Seattle office. Lots of Amazon and Microsoft expats. Nobody around me seems to have any interest in going back.
    - marssaxman 13y ago
      I'll second that, despite having had a pretty bad experience at Google myself. I can't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but around fifteen of my friends moved over to Google over the span of a couple years, mostly from Microsoft and Amazon. Besides me, only two have left; one had a bad time and another wanted to do a startup. Perhaps Mountain View is different, but the Seattle office sure seemed to be full of experienced, hard-working, basically contented engineers. It had many of the same faults I have come to associate with any large company, sure, but when the linked article asks "does any of that sound familiar", I have to say, "not really".
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Most of it also applies to Microsoft, the proprietary angle even more than Google.
  - throwawaykf 13y ago
    Actually, I think the proprietary technology problem at Google is an entirely different beast from that at companies like Microsoft. At least there are comparable competing components, libraries and, heck, entire open source operating systems, to Microsoft's internal and proprietary technologies. Google, on the other hand, is so far ahead in some areas that tools that are commodities within Google don't have anything even remotely comparable outside.
- n3rdy 13y ago
  The post could just as easily describe the U.S military, law enforcement, religions, or any other highly competitive company. It's eerie how well this applies so broadly.
  - patio11 13y ago
    That wouldn't actually surprise Marxist (&tc) critics of capitalism that much. I'm largely not persuaded by their worldview but they have some solid insights on organizational structure as an emergent system of control.
- marssaxman 13y ago
  How do you figure? It sounds like it would apply just as well to Microsoft or Apple.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Seems pretty far fetched, I mean can you imagine what ridiculous lengths you would have to go to in order to maintain the loyalty of the minions? I mean seriously if they woke up to the reality of their situation, who knows what would happen :-) Seems like a common problem explored in literature as well, minor discontent, then an awakening, and then failure as the evil empire fails under more and more egregious attempts to maintain order ...
andrewcooke 13y ago
i don't think you need the last sentence, fwiw. also, early on (before the backpacks and logos), talking about capturing them young reminded me of http://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml
norswap 13y ago
What would the point of the band of minion be? To what (possibly evil) purpose will they be used?
- pbiggar 13y ago
  If I read the subcontext correctly, the band of minions will build software to serve contextual ads to the rest of humanity. Muhahahahahaha!
gyardley 13y ago
I wouldn't use such a pejorative term, but if you want to employ 'minions', you don't need to do anything particularly elaborate - just hire people who want to be minions. You can select for this in your interview process. There's plenty of people out there who want to be told what to do and don't care to spend time thinking about the moral ramifications of their employment, including a great many skilled and experienced programmers. As long as they can choose how to implement what you want, they'll happily implement what you want, collect their paychecks, and go home. Of course, that means you'll have to write extremely detailed specifications, which is a big pain in the ass. And you'll be the only one trying to figure out whether your product is actually something people want, so you damn well better be right.
jmillikin 13y ago
For those who don't regularly follow rachelbythebay.com, this post is a Google allegory. I disagree with a couple points. First, Google really doesn't care as much about education as people think they do. They do love experience. I never graduated high school, and was hired into an SRE position (= programmer writing large-scale sysadmin tools) based on previous work experience. Grades are only useful if you've got nothing else to show off. Second, if you want employees to be loyal to a company with unusually good perks, taking them fresh out of school is a terrible approach. Many people working here indeed have no real idea what working at non-tech companies is like, and that means they assume every other company is like Google. I have heard stories of employees getting frustrated on some project, leaving to work at (e.g.) a bank or webdev shop, and not realizing until their first day that there's no free food, or gym, or weekly heckling of the CEO. I used to work at a defense contractor, I know what it's like being a programmer employed at a non-tech company, and I don't want to ever go back. (In other words, Google might get better retention by implementing Rumspringa) Third, the proprietary parts aren't as pervasive as the article portrays. Our Linux kernel has weird Google-specific interfaces, but they're always in some stage of upstreaming and will eventually be in Linus's trunk. Our RPC system uses the same protobuf rpc-stubs that are generated by the open-source protobuf compiler. Desktops and Laptops run stock {Ubuntu,Windows,MacOS} with a few extra binaries. MapReduce and BigTable were published and inspired dozens of open-source implementations. Many of our Python-based tools have web frontends written with Django. Many systems persist data in MySQL. When Google engineers avoid particular in-fashion systems such as Rails or MongoDB or node.js, it's not because we're ignorant of them, it's because we think they're not good enough.
- leviself 13y ago
  Just curious, why is Mongo not good enough or do you just mean as opposed to BigTable?
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    We have BigTable and protobufs and real MapReduce, so there's no reason to use MongoDB with its JSON storage and Javascript-based mapReduce() function. It's like comparing CSV to SQLite.
ender7 13y ago
Nit: I know we like to be all anti-intellectual here at HN, but Rachel's claim that "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking the ability for independence of thought or action" is pretty ridiculous. Undergraduate and masters programs may be fairly structured, but once you get into a PhD program you are shockingly, horrifyingly alone. Those without the ability to act, plan, or motivate themselves independently do not make it through the 4-8 year (depending on your domain) process. Very occasionally, you'll find an advisor or a lab that will hold your hand through the entire multi-year process, but those experiences are a rarity.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  >>anti-intellectual here at HN What? I've found some very intellectually stimulating discussions here. I don't get the PhD === intellectual thing you're talking about any more than I get the mainstream media equating Edward Snowden's high-school dropout status as indicative of his intelligence. In fact, Snowden seems like a classic intellectual whereas your claims that possessing a PhD correlate highly with intellectualism seem somewhat suspect given my own experiences with possessors of PhDs. Intellectualism is just an interest in ideas and exploring those ideas, and formal educational achievements don't indicate anything other than formal educational achievement.
  - pyre 13y ago
    | "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking | the ability for independence of thought or action" | is pretty ridiculous | Those without the ability to act, plan, or | motivate themselves independently do not make it Does not translate to, or paraphrase as: | PhD === intellectual
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      >>I know we like to be all anti-intellectual here at HN, but Rachel's claim that "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking the ability for independence of thought or action" is pretty ridiculous. In considering the entire sentence, it seems that the argument is: PhD !== inability for "independence of thought or action", which is a sign of anti-intellectualism on HN (presumably because having a PhD has some sort of implied relationship with intellectualism.) The holding of a PhD is the object of criticism in OP's eyes, the criticism being an expression of anti-intellectualism here. I certainly agree with OP that both PhD holders or non-PhD holders can be intellectuals or can be "non-intellectuals," but I was merely pointing out my impression that having PhD doesn't imply anything other than fulfilling the criteria to obtain a PhD. Acting and planning have nothing to do with being an intellectual in my opinion. Those are organizational skills. Intellectualism is more a love of ideas and exploring those ideas, in my obviously not so humble opinion. I've met PhDs that were incredibly erudite about their specific field but completely disinterested in anything outside it, which I would consider "non-intellectualism."
brudgers 13y ago
Proper minions are attracted by the prospect of wielding petty power in an arbitrary manner - a proper minion must enjoy being mean, otherwise, you'll wind up with true piety rather than its pretence. Minions don't play hackysack unless they can exclude someone.
- throwawaykf 13y ago
  How about the famed "pretentious interviewer with a superiority complex" stereotype? (Disclaimer: Non-googler, and I have never met any such interviewers at Google. A couple of them came close, though...)
philwelch 13y ago
As someone who's never worked at Google, this blog post gives me the same kind of curious discomfort I used to have reading michaelochurch comments. Reading ex-Googlers denouncing Google feels a lot like watching a married couple fight. You know there's a history and a relationship there, and one party feels the need to vent at the other, but there's nothing to be gained by witnessing it from the outside.
- sxp 13y ago
  It's a matter of selection bias. Given a company that has X0,000 employees and former employees like Google, there will always be a fraction that don't like the company and a fraction who are vocal. So you mainly hear the vocal ones rather than the silent majority.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Well, sometimes they do have a point. I posted some replies defending open allocation for example.
- Estragon 13y ago
  There's plenty to be gained if you're thinking of dating the party being complained about. :)
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    True, but only if you remember that some 50,000 or so people have "dated" the party being complained about and you're reading the complaints of 2 of them, who also tend to complain about most of the other parties they've "dated".
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Or, indeed, the complainant.
sxp 13y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Google but the following is my personal opinion. FWIW, the part about never deviating from the "One True Way" or the description of Google as "a rigid environment with adherence to arbitrary guidelines" is simply not true. One of the things that is brought up in the initial orientation is that Google is meant to be fault-tolerant and flexible across the board. From an engineering aspect this means that if a single server crashes due to bad code, the system should be flexible enough take steps to recover. From an employee aspect, if the employee isn't happy with their job, they should be able to flexible enough to take steps to recover. However, since Google doesn't micromanage its employees, the employee might forget that this is an option and remain unhappy. In my case, I realized that I wasn't happy with my position a few months after joining the company, remembered what I was told in orientation, talked to HR, and moved to a different position where I was much happier. If I thought the rules were actually inflexible, then I would have stayed in my original position, got burned out, quit after a few months, and probably complained about the company to others. Google is flexible, but requires the person to actually take advantage of this flexibility.
- jrockway 13y ago
  Indeed. I think Google is a better place for people that make their own rules than for those that blindly do everything they're told.
overgard 13y ago
Maybe I'm crazy, but I didn't see this as being specifically about google. It seems more like an illustration of how many modern corporations operate (a great one at that!)
throwawaykf 13y ago
Anecdotal evidence regarding the proprietary technology trap: 1. At another large (but not XXL) "Internet" company, none of the Google SREs have made the SRE hiring bar, precisely because half their answers to "How would you solve problem XYZ?" are "Oh, I'd just use $ProprietaryTechnologyGHJ", to which the response is, "Well, but we don't have $ProprietaryTechnologyGHJ", to which the response is "Uhhh..." 2. Of the couple Google (non-SRE) software engineer interviewees I am directly aware of, nobody has made it through either, partially for similar reasons (reliance on opaque external services). To be fair, their other shortcomings were more significant. 3. One Googler that I know confided that they are terrified of leaving Google, because they wouldn't (paraphrasing) "know how to code in the outside world." 4. Yet another Googler I talked to said that their stack is unimaginably huge, and nobody knows how all of it works, which was (quoting) "probably by design." Make of that what you will.
- jrockway 13y ago
  OK... throwaway account, unnamed company, unverified anecdotes... I should really not reply. Oh well. I'm not sure I believe any of this. Very little of the work we do at Google involves feeding data to some tool and sitting back and watching the results. It's software engineering and problem solving as usual, just with some nice libraries and tools to save time for the hard parts. I'm especially confounded as to what SRE tools would cause someone to "not meet the hiring bar" by responding to a question by saying "I'd just use some proprietary technology". I can't think of any tools that are useful enough to be the singular answer to an open-ended question, and I can't imagine anyone wanting a job saying "just use this tool you've never seen before" in an interview. It's unbelieveable. Being used to certain tools is not specific to Google, either. If you ask a Python programmer trivia questions about Ruby, he's not going to know the answer. But given a week, he'll probably know the answer. Another Googler I talked to said that their stack is unimaginably huge, and nobody knows how all of it works, which was (quoting) "probably by design." Make of that what you will. The stack is big but there is nothing preventing one from understanding other than that it mostly works and so one is not forced to understand it. The code is there and you can start it all up locally on your machine, so I don't really see the problem. It's not huge to keep unhappy Googlers from finding other employment opportunities, as you imply. Anyway, I can't believe I replied to this post and am now going to click the reply button, but here goes...
Pitarou 13y ago
Up to the point where she started talking about Master's degrees, I thought she was talking about Japan.

95 points by ericedge 13y ago

In my experience, this is how the big defense contractors approach software. They will gravitate towards the most expensive proprietary tools in hopes that their engineers will pigeon hole themselves into that environment. I honestly had people tell me that I wasn't allowed to use anything open source (even through the military uses open source all the time) and that ClearCase is the most dominant version control system in the software industry.

epochwolf 13y ago

In case anyone missed it, she's talking about Google. :)

yareally 13y ago
I think you're reading way too far into it being about a specific company. A number of companies people love to like/hate could fall into the specifics she lists, depending on one's views. It's like a crystal ball or clouds in the sky--one sees what they wish to see. Guessing the actual company, if there is one, is kind of disingenuous to the article's message itself though, since it is good depiction of the "ideal" company most of us would want to avoid.
- sses 13y ago
  Context is everything here. There may be a number of companies that fit the pattern, and she could be speaking hypothetically, but Rachel worked at Google and has an axe to grind.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  My assumption is based on the author's previous writings. While it can be applied to many companies, google is the best fit for companies she has talked about.
fredley 13y ago
Not really. All of this can be applied to almost any bank, accountancy firm or large corporate's graduate recruitment strategy.
mixedbit 13y ago
If so, it is rather only her impression of Google. For any company that creates technically challenging products, senior hires should be (and most often are) vital.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  It is only her impression. :)
keithpeter 13y ago
Is this a common reaction to working at Google?
- jsolson 13y ago
  Not in my experience, no. If nothing else, almost everyone I work with is on their second or third career. I'm possibly the youngest guy on my team, and I'm 30. That said, I work out of the Seattle office. Lots of Amazon and Microsoft expats. Nobody around me seems to have any interest in going back.
  - marssaxman 13y ago
    I'll second that, despite having had a pretty bad experience at Google myself. I can't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but around fifteen of my friends moved over to Google over the span of a couple years, mostly from Microsoft and Amazon. Besides me, only two have left; one had a bad time and another wanted to do a startup. Perhaps Mountain View is different, but the Seattle office sure seemed to be full of experienced, hard-working, basically contented engineers. It had many of the same faults I have come to associate with any large company, sure, but when the linked article asks "does any of that sound familiar", I have to say, "not really".
snowwrestler 13y ago
Most of it also applies to Microsoft, the proprietary angle even more than Google.
- throwawaykf 13y ago
  Actually, I think the proprietary technology problem at Google is an entirely different beast from that at companies like Microsoft. At least there are comparable competing components, libraries and, heck, entire open source operating systems, to Microsoft's internal and proprietary technologies. Google, on the other hand, is so far ahead in some areas that tools that are commodities within Google don't have anything even remotely comparable outside.
n3rdy 13y ago
The post could just as easily describe the U.S military, law enforcement, religions, or any other highly competitive company. It's eerie how well this applies so broadly.
- patio11 13y ago
  That wouldn't actually surprise Marxist (&tc) critics of capitalism that much. I'm largely not persuaded by their worldview but they have some solid insights on organizational structure as an emergent system of control.
marssaxman 13y ago
How do you figure? It sounds like it would apply just as well to Microsoft or Apple.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Seems pretty far fetched, I mean can you imagine what ridiculous lengths you would have to go to in order to maintain the loyalty of the minions? I mean seriously if they woke up to the reality of their situation, who knows what would happen :-) Seems like a common problem explored in literature as well, minor discontent, then an awakening, and then failure as the evil empire fails under more and more egregious attempts to maintain order ...

andrewcooke 13y ago

i don't think you need the last sentence, fwiw. also, early on (before the backpacks and logos), talking about capturing them young reminded me of http://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml

norswap 13y ago

What would the point of the band of minion be? To what (possibly evil) purpose will they be used?

pbiggar 13y ago
If I read the subcontext correctly, the band of minions will build software to serve contextual ads to the rest of humanity. Muhahahahahaha!

gyardley 13y ago

I wouldn't use such a pejorative term, but if you want to employ 'minions', you don't need to do anything particularly elaborate - just hire people who want to be minions. You can select for this in your interview process. There's plenty of people out there who want to be told what to do and don't care to spend time thinking about the moral ramifications of their employment, including a great many skilled and experienced programmers. As long as they can choose how to implement what you want, they'll happily implement what you want, collect their paychecks, and go home. Of course, that means you'll have to write extremely detailed specifications, which is a big pain in the ass. And you'll be the only one trying to figure out whether your product is actually something people want, so you damn well better be right.

jmillikin 13y ago

For those who don't regularly follow rachelbythebay.com, this post is a Google allegory. I disagree with a couple points. First, Google really doesn't care as much about education as people think they do. They do love experience. I never graduated high school, and was hired into an SRE position (= programmer writing large-scale sysadmin tools) based on previous work experience. Grades are only useful if you've got nothing else to show off. Second, if you want employees to be loyal to a company with unusually good perks, taking them fresh out of school is a terrible approach. Many people working here indeed have no real idea what working at non-tech companies is like, and that means they assume every other company is like Google. I have heard stories of employees getting frustrated on some project, leaving to work at (e.g.) a bank or webdev shop, and not realizing until their first day that there's no free food, or gym, or weekly heckling of the CEO. I used to work at a defense contractor, I know what it's like being a programmer employed at a non-tech company, and I don't want to ever go back. (In other words, Google might get better retention by implementing Rumspringa) Third, the proprietary parts aren't as pervasive as the article portrays. Our Linux kernel has weird Google-specific interfaces, but they're always in some stage of upstreaming and will eventually be in Linus's trunk. Our RPC system uses the same protobuf rpc-stubs that are generated by the open-source protobuf compiler. Desktops and Laptops run stock {Ubuntu,Windows,MacOS} with a few extra binaries. MapReduce and BigTable were published and inspired dozens of open-source implementations. Many of our Python-based tools have web frontends written with Django. Many systems persist data in MySQL. When Google engineers avoid particular in-fashion systems such as Rails or MongoDB or node.js, it's not because we're ignorant of them, it's because we think they're not good enough.

leviself 13y ago
Just curious, why is Mongo not good enough or do you just mean as opposed to BigTable?
- jmillikin 13y ago
  We have BigTable and protobufs and real MapReduce, so there's no reason to use MongoDB with its JSON storage and Javascript-based mapReduce() function. It's like comparing CSV to SQLite.

ender7 13y ago

Nit: I know we like to be all anti-intellectual here at HN, but Rachel's claim that "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking the ability for independence of thought or action" is pretty ridiculous. Undergraduate and masters programs may be fairly structured, but once you get into a PhD program you are shockingly, horrifyingly alone. Those without the ability to act, plan, or motivate themselves independently do not make it through the 4-8 year (depending on your domain) process. Very occasionally, you'll find an advisor or a lab that will hold your hand through the entire multi-year process, but those experiences are a rarity.

wavefunction 13y ago
>>anti-intellectual here at HN What? I've found some very intellectually stimulating discussions here. I don't get the PhD === intellectual thing you're talking about any more than I get the mainstream media equating Edward Snowden's high-school dropout status as indicative of his intelligence. In fact, Snowden seems like a classic intellectual whereas your claims that possessing a PhD correlate highly with intellectualism seem somewhat suspect given my own experiences with possessors of PhDs. Intellectualism is just an interest in ideas and exploring those ideas, and formal educational achievements don't indicate anything other than formal educational achievement.
- pyre 13y ago
  | "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking | the ability for independence of thought or action" | is pretty ridiculous | Those without the ability to act, plan, or | motivate themselves independently do not make it Does not translate to, or paraphrase as: | PhD === intellectual
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    >>I know we like to be all anti-intellectual here at HN, but Rachel's claim that "having a PhD" correlates strongly with "lacking the ability for independence of thought or action" is pretty ridiculous. In considering the entire sentence, it seems that the argument is: PhD !== inability for "independence of thought or action", which is a sign of anti-intellectualism on HN (presumably because having a PhD has some sort of implied relationship with intellectualism.) The holding of a PhD is the object of criticism in OP's eyes, the criticism being an expression of anti-intellectualism here. I certainly agree with OP that both PhD holders or non-PhD holders can be intellectuals or can be "non-intellectuals," but I was merely pointing out my impression that having PhD doesn't imply anything other than fulfilling the criteria to obtain a PhD. Acting and planning have nothing to do with being an intellectual in my opinion. Those are organizational skills. Intellectualism is more a love of ideas and exploring those ideas, in my obviously not so humble opinion. I've met PhDs that were incredibly erudite about their specific field but completely disinterested in anything outside it, which I would consider "non-intellectualism."

brudgers 13y ago

Proper minions are attracted by the prospect of wielding petty power in an arbitrary manner - a proper minion must enjoy being mean, otherwise, you'll wind up with true piety rather than its pretence. Minions don't play hackysack unless they can exclude someone.

throwawaykf 13y ago
How about the famed "pretentious interviewer with a superiority complex" stereotype? (Disclaimer: Non-googler, and I have never met any such interviewers at Google. A couple of them came close, though...)

philwelch 13y ago

As someone who's never worked at Google, this blog post gives me the same kind of curious discomfort I used to have reading michaelochurch comments. Reading ex-Googlers denouncing Google feels a lot like watching a married couple fight. You know there's a history and a relationship there, and one party feels the need to vent at the other, but there's nothing to be gained by witnessing it from the outside.

sxp 13y ago
It's a matter of selection bias. Given a company that has X0,000 employees and former employees like Google, there will always be a fraction that don't like the company and a fraction who are vocal. So you mainly hear the vocal ones rather than the silent majority.
yuhong 13y ago
Well, sometimes they do have a point. I posted some replies defending open allocation for example.
Estragon 13y ago
There's plenty to be gained if you're thinking of dating the party being complained about. :)
- nostrademons 13y ago
  True, but only if you remember that some 50,000 or so people have "dated" the party being complained about and you're reading the complaints of 2 of them, who also tend to complain about most of the other parties they've "dated".
- philwelch 13y ago
  Or, indeed, the complainant.

sxp 13y ago

Disclaimer: I work for Google but the following is my personal opinion. FWIW, the part about never deviating from the "One True Way" or the description of Google as "a rigid environment with adherence to arbitrary guidelines" is simply not true. One of the things that is brought up in the initial orientation is that Google is meant to be fault-tolerant and flexible across the board. From an engineering aspect this means that if a single server crashes due to bad code, the system should be flexible enough take steps to recover. From an employee aspect, if the employee isn't happy with their job, they should be able to flexible enough to take steps to recover. However, since Google doesn't micromanage its employees, the employee might forget that this is an option and remain unhappy. In my case, I realized that I wasn't happy with my position a few months after joining the company, remembered what I was told in orientation, talked to HR, and moved to a different position where I was much happier. If I thought the rules were actually inflexible, then I would have stayed in my original position, got burned out, quit after a few months, and probably complained about the company to others. Google is flexible, but requires the person to actually take advantage of this flexibility.

jrockway 13y ago
Indeed. I think Google is a better place for people that make their own rules than for those that blindly do everything they're told.

overgard 13y ago

Maybe I'm crazy, but I didn't see this as being specifically about google. It seems more like an illustration of how many modern corporations operate (a great one at that!)

throwawaykf 13y ago

Anecdotal evidence regarding the proprietary technology trap: 1. At another large (but not XXL) "Internet" company, none of the Google SREs have made the SRE hiring bar, precisely because half their answers to "How would you solve problem XYZ?" are "Oh, I'd just use $ProprietaryTechnologyGHJ", to which the response is, "Well, but we don't have $ProprietaryTechnologyGHJ", to which the response is "Uhhh..." 2. Of the couple Google (non-SRE) software engineer interviewees I am directly aware of, nobody has made it through either, partially for similar reasons (reliance on opaque external services). To be fair, their other shortcomings were more significant. 3. One Googler that I know confided that they are terrified of leaving Google, because they wouldn't (paraphrasing) "know how to code in the outside world." 4. Yet another Googler I talked to said that their stack is unimaginably huge, and nobody knows how all of it works, which was (quoting) "probably by design." Make of that what you will.

jrockway 13y ago
OK... throwaway account, unnamed company, unverified anecdotes... I should really not reply. Oh well. I'm not sure I believe any of this. Very little of the work we do at Google involves feeding data to some tool and sitting back and watching the results. It's software engineering and problem solving as usual, just with some nice libraries and tools to save time for the hard parts. I'm especially confounded as to what SRE tools would cause someone to "not meet the hiring bar" by responding to a question by saying "I'd just use some proprietary technology". I can't think of any tools that are useful enough to be the singular answer to an open-ended question, and I can't imagine anyone wanting a job saying "just use this tool you've never seen before" in an interview. It's unbelieveable. Being used to certain tools is not specific to Google, either. If you ask a Python programmer trivia questions about Ruby, he's not going to know the answer. But given a week, he'll probably know the answer. Another Googler I talked to said that their stack is unimaginably huge, and nobody knows how all of it works, which was (quoting) "probably by design." Make of that what you will. The stack is big but there is nothing preventing one from understanding other than that it mostly works and so one is not forced to understand it. The code is there and you can start it all up locally on your machine, so I don't really see the problem. It's not huge to keep unhappy Googlers from finding other employment opportunities, as you imply. Anyway, I can't believe I replied to this post and am now going to click the reply button, but here goes...

Pitarou 13y ago

Up to the point where she started talking about Master's degrees, I thought she was talking about Japan.