7 ms·

The People’s Republic of Google

81 points by bensummers 17y ago

peregrine 17y ago
Engineers running Engineers sounds like an Engineers paradise.
- bensummers 17y ago
  Plus it makes money. What's not to love?
  - bartw 17y ago
    I see it now, getting bought by Disney, fire everyone except those keeping the servers alive, add marketing.
- tybris 17y ago
  Not sure, I always enjoyed the business and engineering running each other at Amazon.
binarycheese 17y ago
While working as a software consultant for the federal government here in DC, I noticed something very strange ... consulting firms don't have any idea what Peer Review is. Actually, they don't even care, all they want to do is complete a project with as little money, and as fast as possible so they can move onto the next contract while billing the government millions.
- pyre 17y ago
  It's even better if no one else can figure out their mess. Then the government has to hire them back in to fix it!
idlewords 17y ago
50-60 direct reports per manager sounds hard to believe. That's worse than a California student/teacher ratio.
- curtis 17y ago
  My manager at Google probably had about 15 direct reports while I was there. But he also had 4 or 5 dev leads working for him. I tended to think of him as my second-level manager, although in hind-sight, that was probably a mistake, since I don't think he saw it that way.
shykes 17y ago
I wonder if this is also true for the Google Ads group. In some regards they might as well be a separate company.
curtis 17y ago
From my brief foray at Google, I can say that the code review process can be used to ruthlessly enforce orthodoxy. I would not say that this results in "clean code" as I would use the term. On the other hand the JavaScript code I saw was very, very uniform. It was also a bloated pig in my professional estimation. The JavaScript project I worked on had something like 15k lines of code and I rewrote maybe half of it (most of the UI) in 1200-1500 lines of code, and I still think I could have done the whole thing in around 3000. That particular 20 percent project didn't win me any friends it seems, or even convince anybody that I knew what I was doing.
- neilk 17y ago
  When I was there (2005-2006, so, ancient history maybe), Google had a cultural problem with languages like Javascript. All their coding standards were developed for languages like C++ and Java and the typical Google engineer had the most experience in such languages. Projects that promised to relieve the programmer from having to write in nasty Javascript (such as GWT) had a lot of support. There are islands of Javascripters in Google, but many of them are working on the browser initiatives. That said, the article is right about the importance of peer review at Google, although the headline is typical journalistic bait. Google's culture isn't so much engineering as it is science. Business is understood as an ongoing experiment. Opinions are worthless, only data counts. The results are stunning and many cowboy developers have become converts. There are many parts of Google's codebase that are so beautiful they almost brought tears to my eyes. You don't know what it's like to see megabyte after megabyte of source code scroll by, and you can't tell who wrote it. The same conventions are used everywhere, "tricky" parts are at an absolute minimum, and good documentation is usually a given. If there's one thing about Google culture that is worth preserving in all the startups now budding off, it's the peer review.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Both this and the parent (and even the OP, controlling for Cringely) give a fascinating perspective on Google's culture of peer review. Just out of curiosity, can you give some examples of how coding standards developed for C++ and Java wouldn't translate well to JS? (I'm a little surprised to hear about an anti-JS bias there, actually, though it does explain GWT.)
jpwagner 17y ago
"Effectively, there is no marketing." Just because these engineers don't know what other responsibilities were being handled does not mean there were none.
stanleydrew 17y ago
The fact that it works so well (makes so much money) comes down to the realization I had that Google isn’t a software company at all. It’s an advertising company. Google is not an advertising company any more than NBC is an advertising company. The reason Google makes so much money comes down to the fact that they have built the (perceived) best and cleanest search product on the internet. A lot of that probably has to do with writing great peer-reviewed code.
- jleyank 17y ago
  Maybe "advertising" is the wrong, but both Google and NBC are in the business of selling eyeballs to companies selling products. They choose different media, and one can't really call a TV network cool, but it's the same revenue stream(s).
hristov 17y ago
Oh no! No marketing! Communism! It must be stopped! Shudder. BTW the reason Google's products are in perpetual beta is because they do not plan to charge the end user ever so they do not need a release version and they have figured out that if they keep saying their product is in beta, they do not have to do annoying things like providing customer service.
- pyre 17y ago
  Well, they also don't provide (good or reasonable) customer service for their cash cow products like AdSense and AdWords, so what does that tell you?
nihilocrat 17y ago
What's so bad about no marketing? I've got a chip on my shoulder because we severely disappointed customers by shipping a product that lacked tons of features that marketing had hyped up beforehand. Most of their ideas to win back customers were good in spirit but were bogged down by banal details and deceitful trial terms / payment rules. I fully accept the idea that this is just an example of terrible marketing and not representative of marketing as a whole, but I haven't got a personal experience of marketing being a huge boon. I can't say I'm a good example because the end users of my code are company employees, I make internal tools, but even then we try to set our own deadlines and keep them with no external dictation of when stuff must be done.

81 points by bensummers 17y ago

peregrine 17y ago

Engineers running Engineers sounds like an Engineers paradise.

bensummers 17y ago
Plus it makes money. What's not to love?
- bartw 17y ago
  I see it now, getting bought by Disney, fire everyone except those keeping the servers alive, add marketing.
tybris 17y ago
Not sure, I always enjoyed the business and engineering running each other at Amazon.

binarycheese 17y ago

While working as a software consultant for the federal government here in DC, I noticed something very strange ... consulting firms don't have any idea what Peer Review is. Actually, they don't even care, all they want to do is complete a project with as little money, and as fast as possible so they can move onto the next contract while billing the government millions.

pyre 17y ago
It's even better if no one else can figure out their mess. Then the government has to hire them back in to fix it!

idlewords 17y ago

50-60 direct reports per manager sounds hard to believe. That's worse than a California student/teacher ratio.

curtis 17y ago
My manager at Google probably had about 15 direct reports while I was there. But he also had 4 or 5 dev leads working for him. I tended to think of him as my second-level manager, although in hind-sight, that was probably a mistake, since I don't think he saw it that way.

shykes 17y ago

I wonder if this is also true for the Google Ads group. In some regards they might as well be a separate company.

curtis 17y ago

From my brief foray at Google, I can say that the code review process can be used to ruthlessly enforce orthodoxy. I would not say that this results in "clean code" as I would use the term. On the other hand the JavaScript code I saw was very, very uniform. It was also a bloated pig in my professional estimation. The JavaScript project I worked on had something like 15k lines of code and I rewrote maybe half of it (most of the UI) in 1200-1500 lines of code, and I still think I could have done the whole thing in around 3000. That particular 20 percent project didn't win me any friends it seems, or even convince anybody that I knew what I was doing.

neilk 17y ago
When I was there (2005-2006, so, ancient history maybe), Google had a cultural problem with languages like Javascript. All their coding standards were developed for languages like C++ and Java and the typical Google engineer had the most experience in such languages. Projects that promised to relieve the programmer from having to write in nasty Javascript (such as GWT) had a lot of support. There are islands of Javascripters in Google, but many of them are working on the browser initiatives. That said, the article is right about the importance of peer review at Google, although the headline is typical journalistic bait. Google's culture isn't so much engineering as it is science. Business is understood as an ongoing experiment. Opinions are worthless, only data counts. The results are stunning and many cowboy developers have become converts. There are many parts of Google's codebase that are so beautiful they almost brought tears to my eyes. You don't know what it's like to see megabyte after megabyte of source code scroll by, and you can't tell who wrote it. The same conventions are used everywhere, "tricky" parts are at an absolute minimum, and good documentation is usually a given. If there's one thing about Google culture that is worth preserving in all the startups now budding off, it's the peer review.
- gruseom 17y ago
  Both this and the parent (and even the OP, controlling for Cringely) give a fascinating perspective on Google's culture of peer review. Just out of curiosity, can you give some examples of how coding standards developed for C++ and Java wouldn't translate well to JS? (I'm a little surprised to hear about an anti-JS bias there, actually, though it does explain GWT.)

jpwagner 17y ago

"Effectively, there is no marketing." Just because these engineers don't know what other responsibilities were being handled does not mean there were none.

stanleydrew 17y ago

The fact that it works so well (makes so much money) comes down to the realization I had that Google isn’t a software company at all. It’s an advertising company. Google is not an advertising company any more than NBC is an advertising company. The reason Google makes so much money comes down to the fact that they have built the (perceived) best and cleanest search product on the internet. A lot of that probably has to do with writing great peer-reviewed code.

jleyank 17y ago
Maybe "advertising" is the wrong, but both Google and NBC are in the business of selling eyeballs to companies selling products. They choose different media, and one can't really call a TV network cool, but it's the same revenue stream(s).

hristov 17y ago

Oh no! No marketing! Communism! It must be stopped! Shudder. BTW the reason Google's products are in perpetual beta is because they do not plan to charge the end user ever so they do not need a release version and they have figured out that if they keep saying their product is in beta, they do not have to do annoying things like providing customer service.

pyre 17y ago
Well, they also don't provide (good or reasonable) customer service for their cash cow products like AdSense and AdWords, so what does that tell you?

nihilocrat 17y ago

What's so bad about no marketing? I've got a chip on my shoulder because we severely disappointed customers by shipping a product that lacked tons of features that marketing had hyped up beforehand. Most of their ideas to win back customers were good in spirit but were bogged down by banal details and deceitful trial terms / payment rules. I fully accept the idea that this is just an example of terrible marketing and not representative of marketing as a whole, but I haven't got a personal experience of marketing being a huge boon. I can't say I'm a good example because the end users of my code are company employees, I make internal tools, but even then we try to set our own deadlines and keep them with no external dictation of when stuff must be done.