
The Google Vortex  - soundsop
http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201103#24
======
jacobian
I was nodding along so strongly to the first half of this that I was genuinely
surprised when the other shoe dropped. I see another friend get sucked into
the vortex nearly every week, and it's gotten to the point where I have
trouble being happy for them. I mean, I'm thrilled to see friends do well, but
I know that suddenly a great mind has been removed from the larger community.

Conversations with pre-Google-employment friends go along the lines of:

"What are you working on?" "Well I was working on an inventory tracking system
using Flask and Redis so I needed to kludge together something to store
session in ..."

After getting hired by Google, these conversations are more like:

"What are you working on?" "App Engine." "Oh. Um. What parts?" "Oh, you know.
Python and stuff."

It's sad.

So congrats to Avery and everyone else who's getting sucked in. I'm sure
things are awesome over there, and I hope some day you'll be able to come back
out and tell the rest of us about it.

But I sure as hell am never going to give up my freedom to talk to my friends.

~~~
tytso
It really depends on what project you're working on at Google. Some are so
secret you can't even reveal their name, or even what general area that they
are in. Others are done completely in the open. For example, if you work on
Chrome or Chrome OS, most of what people work on is available in public
repositories.

I work on the production kernel for our data centers, and most of what I do is
completely public. In fact at the moment I am working on a way to decrease
seek overhead when writing large files to ext4, and I have been releasing the
in-progress patchsets for review and comment both in and outside Google. Why?
Because I've gotten some really valuable comments both at the design level,
and "spot the stupid bug" level, both inside and outside of Google.

That being said, there are some really cool things that are only available
inside the Google kernel. For example, we can track every read, write, and
seek operation at the hardware level, and tell you whether it is metadata or
data, what application was responsible for issuing the request, and then
correlate this information across multiple machines and in fact across the
entire data center, and give you a single high-level view of your map reduce,
or your application homed on hundreds of machines, so you can see how it is
actually using all of the disk spindles associated with that job. And its
overhead is small enough that we can leave it running by default, as opposed
to only turning it on during debugging/benchmarking runs (ala blktrace).

Why haven't we shared this with the external world? Well, part of it is
because it depends on infrastructure which is Google-specific, but the main
reason is because we can't find the right people to help us clean up the code
so it would be mainline acceptable, disentangle the Google-specific
enhancements, negotiate with the upstream Linux kernel maintainers whose
subsystems are touched by this code, and get it into mainline kernel. And for
most of these kernel enhancements (of which this is only one), we _want_ to
get them upstream, because every single one of these enhancements (while they
are really cool and there is no way we would give them up), makes it harder
for us to rebase the kernel so we can get the latest enhancements from
upstream. More people using it means we hopefully will get a community of
people collaborating to make the technology better --- which means free
engineering help for us! :-)

The problem is headcount; we need to staff up this and other projects before
we can do things like push more of these Google-specific enhancements upstream
to the Linux kernel. (Some of it is happening now, slowly, but we have lots of
other production and release priorities which take precedence.) Unfortunately,
it's really hard to find Systems People who are interested and willing to do
low-level Linux kernel programming, and can also see the "big picture" systems
issues.

So if you think you're a hotshot Systems designer who is not afraid to get
their fingers dirty coding low-level Linux kernel code, we're hiring (and not
just in storage, although that's my area; contact me). And if you come to work
at Google, you may be surprised at how much you can talk to your friends
about, and even publish as a paper at a conference. Yes, there is plenty of
stuff about features under development in Google Docs, Search, Android, that
you'll be able to play with as an early dogfooder, and that stuff you won't be
able to share with your friends. And some stuff we can't share because it
would harm our relationship with our hardware partners --- but even there,
Google has published a paper at FAST describing the failure rate and patterns
of hard drives (although we anonymized the specific names of the disk drive
manufacturers involved, for obvious reasons).

I'm surprised people think this is such a big deal, actually, because
invariably there is some stuff that you have to keep secret at all companies.
I found that there was more stuff related to my day-to-day work which I had to
keep quiet at my former employer, IBM, than I am here at Google. And I'm sure
that Apple engineers would be even more constrained!

~~~
saurik
_For example, if you work on Chrome or Chrome OS, most of what people work on
is available in public repositories._

For what it is worth, when I read this article one of the people it reminded
me of is someone from the Chrome OS team. It might be, however, that with the
release of the Cr48 that the situation has changed (I last talked to him days
after those shipped). The people I've met from the Chromium team, however,
were certainly a different story.

However, I know a /lot/ of people at Google (Chrome OS, Books, Social, Native
Client, Ads, Docs, and those are just the people I know a project title for),
and for almost all of them the article's content rang true.

I'd add one more thing, though: I often get to hear about just how much
fundamentally better their tools are, or how much larger their scale of
operation is, with this background attitude of legitimate pity. To be clear, I
mean to say that I get a really legitimate positive emotional read from them
of "I wish you were here, too, so you could play with me on the other side
with all of this cool stuff".

 _And I'm sure that Apple engineers would be even more constrained!_

I never actually knew many people who wanted to work for Apple, but those who
did are certainly in a fundamentally different class of secrecy: for all
intents and purposes they are now dead to me (which may be a uniquely-me
problem: I could see them being fired for even talking to me; the treatment I
now get from them is "head down, don't reply, shut down conversation, leave
venue").

------
YuriNiyazov
"Many of them emerge talking about bureaucracy, politics, 'big company
attitude', projects that got killed, and how things 'aren't like they used to
be.'".

There's a great book called "Watership Down". In it, a band of ragtag rabbits
whose home was destroyed come across a warren where all rabbits are well-fed
and seemingly happy, and yet, something is wrong, every so often one of them
disappears. Except no one talks about it, because that would mean admitting
that they live on a rabbit farm.

Draw your own conclusion.

~~~
tytso
A lot of this is relative. If you are used to a 30 person company, yes,
there's more politics. Compared to where I came from (a 300,000 person
company), Google is much, much better. (And if you think the politics are bad
in companies, its nothing compared to the politics in a university's I/T
department. Why? Perhaps because there's less at stake...)

I've worked for a university (MIT), a startup (VA Linux), a big company (IBM),
and compared to my past employers, I've easily found Google to be the best for
me. Others may find the environment at a 30 person, 300 person, or 300,000
person company more congenial. A lot of it is personal preference...

------
shadowsun7
I think it's worth noting that while Google has a vortex (cool employees go
in, harder for them to come out), Facebook has seen so many people leaving and
doing innovative things that it's got it's very own mafia now.

Perhaps because it's possible to do something new and crazy (and unrelated) in
Google, and not so possible to do so in Facebook.

~~~
PakG1
That's not a fair comparison. Facebook's mafia guys are mostly early-stage
employees. Early-stage employees tend to be more entrepreneurial and are also
more tight-knit, which is how the mafia sentiment is able to sustain itself.

Plenty of Googlers are entrepreneurial enough to leave and do startups, but
they aren't considered mafia because they were never part of an early core
group that bonded. And those that are entrepreneurial enough to leave aren't
as high-profile entrepreneurial as early-stage employees would be.

------
mycroftiv
One of the main realities of our current world that I strongly disagree with
is the existence of the NDA. I don't believe that individual human beings
should ever be required to waive their right to say whatever they want to
about anything. Of course, the entire corporate universe is based on NDAs and
secrecy and competition - I wonder what an alternate universe based on free
sharing of information and cooperation would be like. I'm pretty sure its a
universe that I would prefer to live in.

~~~
kenjackson
You never have to join a company with an NDA. It is about as clear of a choice
in life as you'll ever have.

~~~
guelo
I've had quite a few tech jobs and I've had to sign that piece of paper at
everyone of them, including at my own startup.

~~~
kenjackson
I've worked at plenty of jobs that don't require NDAs -- if NDAs are offensive
enough, find an industry where they're not prevalent. And if you bootstrap
your own startup you shouldn't need one.

------
CoolGuySteve
"A universe where on average, each employee produced $425,450 in profit in
2010, after deducting their salary and all other expenses. (Or alternatively:
$1.2 million in revenue.)"

Wait a minute, you generate that much profit and then you don't get paid even
half that much? Sounds like why I left Apple.

~~~
apenwarr
Remember that's an average. Some people produce less and get paid less, some
people produce more and get paid more. The two are not always correlated of
course. In fact, at Google in particular, I'm sure it's crazily skewed: most
people there are probably net money losers, and AdWords floats them all.

If you took a vote, I bet the majority of people at Google would be terrified
to get paid according to the corporate earnings they account for.

Also note that the quoted earnings have of course deducted anything that got
paid directly to the owners; the listed earnings are the money that is getting
re-invested straight back into the company, not paid to the founders, so it's
not quite valid to compare it directly to what you would earn if you owned the
company.

~~~
nostrademons
It's hard to do an accounting, because virtually everything at Google is a
team effort. There've been projects I've worked on that have generated
hundreds of millions in additional revenue. However, there was a group
downstream of us in Ads doing the actual sales. And we had groups upstream
that we rely upon for data. And those groups had groups upstream of them that
managed the infrastructure. Who earned the money? If you take out any one
component of the pipeline, it never happened.

------
cal5k
It's sort of annoying, actually, that Google is hiring so voraciously in
Waterloo. It's making it extremely difficult for us to hire awesome Waterloo
grads partly for this reason.

So, while we continue to hire from Waterloo where it works, we're also looking
further afield for talent... Iqaluit here we come!

~~~
apenwarr
I agree with you, and about Waterloo specifically.

I'm probably going to be banned from HN for saying this, but the giant Google
talent vacuum cleaner is one potential reason that starting a startup right
now is especially difficult and maybe not the right choice.

When I've started startups before, it's been in economic down times (eg. right
after the .com boom). I actually preferred it that way.

~~~
cal5k
To be honest, one can always find a reason NOT to start a company. Successful
companies have been founded in good times and in bad, in war and in peace,
with easy access to talent or with one helluva difficult grind.

------
ChuckMcM
I really hope it works out fabulously for you. Say "Hi!" to the Andele guys
and their delicious burritos. My experience was that working at Google was
unlike any other place I've ever worked before (or since).

~~~
rachelbythebay
Andale is gone, sorry to say.

It's different, that's for sure. Different isn't necessarily equal to better,
though.

------
stcredzero
_Help solve...the annoying way that surprise popularity usually means losing
more money (hosting fees) by surprise._

Google is going to create an updated version of Geocities?

