
A Decade at Google - dwenzek
http://wp.sigmod.org/?p=1851
======
emilsedgh
Just wanted to highlight a very important advice on the article:

 _You do not reach [work life] balance by reducing work. You reach balance by
finding a passion that draws you out of work._

~~~
yodsanklai
Not sure I understand this advice. How to explain to my employer that I'm
going to spend less time working because I have better things to do?

~~~
untog
The same way you explain to your employer that you have defined working hours,
and will be working within them.

~~~
deaconblues
Thank you. I was reprimanded once for essentially "only" being at the office
for the defined time we agreed I would be there. I spent some time racking my
brain until I decided I wasn't being unreasonable.

~~~
johnward
There is this hyaundai commercial (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ8Klm8vPlI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ8Klm8vPlI)
) that hits home for me. "When did leaving work on time become an act of
courage". It's so true.

~~~
sanderjd
I've always found it humorous that the clock hits 6:00 rather than 5:00.
"Leaving work on time is an act of courage, but _let 's not get crazy_!"
Presumably he courageously started at 10:00 or took an hour away from work for
lunch.

~~~
cdf
Where I worked, official hours are 8.30 to 6. In Asia of course.

~~~
sanderjd
Is the official work week 47.5 hours?

In the U.S., while I think it's true that people tend to work closer to 50
hours, we pay lip service to the "40 hour work week".

------
chrisseaton
This guy says that he's in 'Google Research' and talks about job titles like
'junior researcher'. Is there or is there not an actual Google Research
organisation, similar to Oracle Labs or Microsoft Research? With people doing
full-time research and publishing papers?

I was under the impression that their policy was 'you can do research anywhere
in Google' and that there was no separate staffed labs doing more academic
research. You may get research in the V8 team, or the systems team or
whatever, but they were doing research as part of product teams. At least
that's what I was told when I applied.

~~~
DannyBee
So, the answer to your question is really two fold:

Google Research used to be pretty separate. That is, it was a separate product
area from other product areas. It is no longer. This is an organizational
issue however, and while it would seem like it mattered, it did not. It only
changed who was the SVP overseeing it at some super high level. The VP was the
same for many many years, and the person really in charge.

But this is irrelevant to the second part of your question, where you mention:
"and that there was no separate staffed labs doing more academic research."

They do not do "more academic research", so in that sense, your recruiter was
right.

Research at Google is not about academic vs industrial. The practical
difference between the research scientist and SWE ladders is that in research
scientist, publishing is valued as well. Outside of research, it's certainly
nice, but not really part of the job description.

However, unlike most other places, publishing alone is not the goal. If all
you ever did was research and publish, you'd be fired :)

Google expects research scientists to do real coding, real work, and be as
good of SWE's as their SWE's.

It is a very hybrid approach, and different from most other places.

~~~
iraphael
I'm interested in learning more about the research ladder (and how it's
different to the SWE ladder) at Google.

So I found this:
[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/38149.pdf)

If anyone has other interesting resources about the general employee structure
at Google/other big companies, please reply :)

------
scast
Alon Halevy is pretty big in the field of data integration. Some of my
undergrad project was about improving certain aspects on his work on LAV
integration. You might also find his work by Alon Levy instead of Halevy. If
you want a theoretical view of the field, checkout Maurizio Lenzerini's work.

For a perspective/survey check this out:
[http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~degiacom/didattica/semingsoft/ma...](http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~degiacom/didattica/semingsoft/materiale/3-data-
integration/references/Lenzerini-survey-pods-02.pdf)

------
geebee
I found the part about coding interesting..

"My coding activities were always productive. They either launched a new
project or a major change in direction of a project. They also enabled me to
have discussions with my team members at a completely different level of
detail (to everyone’s enjoyment)."

This can be great. It sounds like it went well. However, I have personally
seen a downside, some potential risks, when the boss "keeps coding".

Here's why - if the boss is coding but staying off the critical path, this
means that the often detailed, difficult implementation work will be delegated
to developers who report to the boss. The old adage that genius is 1%
inspiration, 99% perspiration? Well, the critical path is the perspiration
part. Deadlines, estimates, glaring errors that shouldn't have happened and
need to be fixed late at night or over the weekend… these are all part of the
critical path. While coding can keep a boss closer to a technical team, it can
also create a dangerous illusion, that the boss is still "technical" but
insulated from the truly difficult aspects of a technical role. There is a
big, big difference between coding on your own research project and coding
under deadline pressure for a system that needs to work. This is only a risk,
not a certainty, as a good manager will recognize this.

Perhaps a greater risk, though, is that if the boss gets to play around with
new technology and launch projects for the rest of the team to finish off,
there's a risk that the boss is pretty much eating the frosting of the team's
dessert but making everyone else eat their vegetables, so to speak. If you're
a manager who codes, keep in mind that autonomy and innovation may be key to
the motivation and job satisfaction of the people working for you. This can
lead to a very damaging management anti-pattern, where a manager who "keeps
coding" essentially uses managerial authority to intercept and filter
projects, make the key technical decisions, do the interesting bits that would
lead to interesting conference talks, and then delegate the work of actually
finishing the product to the team. This may deprive senior level developers
the autonomy that they really were supposed to have on projects.

Once again, I want to emphasize that this isn't necessarily what happened
here, in fact, it sounds like it wasn't. But the passage made me a bit
nervous, since I consider this to be something of a management anti-pattern.

~~~
gavazzy
A manager who doesn't continue to code or work on the day-to-day actions may
fail to keep up with necessary technical knowledge, effectively reducing their
ability to manage.

~~~
tajen
The problem with a boss coding is that they don't dedicate enough time to
management. Connections, management theory and functional knowledge are
important.

Instead of a boss who is part-time manager, have we tried managing 3/4 of the
year then doing a "developer rotation"? How does that work?

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michielr
Down for me, Google cache link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WpRJJJ-...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WpRJJJ-4DwwJ:wp.sigmod.org/%3Fp%3D1851+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be)

~~~
chubot
Down for me, but is it just me or is Google's cache kinda broken? When I click
the cache link I get a blank page, and then "waiting for wp.sigmod.org..." at
the bottom, which hangs forever. I guess it hits the live site if it doesn't
have it in the cache?

~~~
m_eiman
You can get the text-only cached version here:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WpRJJJ-...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WpRJJJ-4DwwJ:wp.sigmod.org/%3Fp%3D1851&hl=nl&gl=be&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

The normal cached version still tries to download images and whatnot from the
original server.

------
mjlangiii
Good tip for balancing work and life - just find other interests that pull you
away from work.

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jayvanguard
Some sound advice. Having worked with academics before, the ones who were most
successful were able to switch gears between individual and team goals as he
describes.

------
amelius
> We then could inspect the query stream to estimate how many queries might be
> well served by HTML tables.

Hmm.. humans are inspecting the query stream?

~~~
asuffield
Yes. Click here and you'll be one of them:
[https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&nco...](https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol=5)

There's lots more data over here:
[http://www.google.com/trends](http://www.google.com/trends)

(I don't believe the author was referring to this, I think he meant something
far less interesting.)

------
hrshtr
Congrats for completing a decade and for your achievements !!

------
sabujp
> (or if you cannot code, get involved in code reviews).

This is the worst advice ever, esp. if you don't know how to code and don't
have code readability for the language being used in the code review. Learn
from code reviews, see what other people are saying, but don't comment on a
fix unless you found something glaringly obvious.

~~~
jsolson
I'm a C++ developer at Google; I've been writing software "professionally"[0]
for about 16 years, including a fair chunk of C, but no C++ until I reached
Google. So, arguably I started in a position where commenting on code reviews
was a bad idea.

Nonetheless, I commented on LOTS of code reviews when I joined, but almost
always with questions asking (usually) 'why is this done this way?' or
(rarely) 'could this by done this other way?'. It helps that our code review
tool lets you mark comments as 'no action required'. This allows the first
form to be a genuine question without judgement. I would usually learn
something, and sometimes the original author would revisit a decision and
improve the code. I reserve the second form for when I'm pretty sure I think
what I'm suggesting is an improvement.

In my experience this allowed me to provide feedback without perceived ego or
offense[1], but also accelerated the rate at which I came up to speed on both
the language and the details of the project I'd joined. Despite being a few
years in now and fairly familiar with our project, I try (although sometimes
fail) to maintain this style today.

[0]: My father got me my first development job as a subcontractor building
terminal emulation software for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission at 16.
I'd learned C a few years beforehand on QNX. A number of other jobs from the
same folks followed over the years while I finished up high school and
undergrad.

[1]: Usually, anyway. There are some people who take ANY comment, question, or
critique as an accusation. Thankfully I've encountered only one of these
people at Google.

