

Day in the life of a Googler (Matt Welsh) - siddhant
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/12/day-in-life-of-googler.html

======
mbm
This reminds me of a quote I read from a lecture a few years back by a history
prof at Colby:

"How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I
cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy.
But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am
reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt
sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had
been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating,
though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not
really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really
meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and
was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he
dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics,
out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political
activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for
the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political
journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized
that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he
did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history,
linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do?
Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he
applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway
through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics
department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was
study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.

I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how
his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in
1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture
akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick
glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times
magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of
a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and
Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics
problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything,"
might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly
of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you
analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an
observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of
us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it.
I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for
all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire
career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math,
as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery,
and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."

~~~
bedris
This is a great story, but it suffers from a certain measure of survivorship
bias. Ed Witten certainly had the fortitude and introspection to jump from
field to field yet still keep in mind the ultimate goal of his explorations
(which eventually led to great success) but my guess is that most people that
hastily quit most endeavors that don't immediately strike their fancy do not
end up nearly as successful.

~~~
lukeschlather
So long as you're making an honest effort, and actually working, there's no
shame in stopping if it appears to you that your effort will not be rewarded.
Witten, from that summary, spent at least a semester on all of his failed
endeavors, and if three months is too hasty, we humans may be too short-lived
to be properly deliberative.

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dominostars
This article reminds me of those weight loss infomercials:

\- In 'fat' mode, the video color is bad, and the person is frowning, sad.

\- In 'skinny' mode, the video color is clear, the person is smiling, and
their complexion is better.

This gives the illusion that there's a dramatic change in the person's weight,
when often they've only lost 10 pounds (which is great, just not dramatic). In
the same way, there doesn't seem too big a change in Matt's schedule, there's
just a shift in attitude. It probably wasn't a requirement to "Groan at the
amount of work I have to do before the onslaught of meetings in the
afternoon", or to "spend next 45 minutes reading Engadget, Hacker News, and
Facebook". In the end, he had about 3 hours to work at Harvard, and did about
4 hours of work at Google.

It's interesting to dig into what's actually changed between jobs, because you
might not completely know what you want in a work environment.

~~~
ephermata
Nitpick: Matt was at Harvard, not Stanford.

With respect to what has changed, one of the things that comes through is that
his day at Google is more self-directed and less interrupt driven. Fewer
meetings, no petitioning others for grants or industrial money, no need to get
up in front of a class, and no meetings with students. Instead there are three
or four projects that need to make progress, but how exactly that happens is
up to him.

~~~
dominostars
Nitpick noted, and duly edited!

It just seems weird that he would compare schedules to make the point that he
likes the kind of work he does better at Google. Lectures and office hours are
a productive part of being a professor. He had some meetings about grants, but
it was not much longer than his meetings at Google.

~~~
ephermata
Grant writing is stressful and has an impact beyond just the meetings directly
discussing the grant. I haven't had the pleasure of writing them myself, but I
know several people who do. There is intense pressure because the grants pay
the stipends and tuition for your students and postdocs. If the grant does not
succeed, you can't support them. In some cases you need grants to pay your
summer salary, as well (rules here are complicated). Add this to low
acceptance rates from most major funding agencies and long lead times between
submission and the decision, and you have a pretty stressful situation.

Most of this work is spent in polishing the grant and figuring out how to best
present your research agenda. This is not writing code, so if you'd rather be
writing code, this isn't really a good fit for you.

~~~
jimbokun
In other words, being a professor has far more sales and management
responsibilities than the average software developer's gig.

~~~
Create
Yes. It is all about writing business plans in advance: i.e. have the poker-
face to promise in advance to the funding agencies' excel-wrangling paper-
tossers, that you will make that given discovery [WTF!].

It is like raising VC capital: an agency is likely to be more friendly, if it
sees another take some of the initial funding risk. So you sell your idea, and
manage the project -- not unlike a feudalistic landlord.

------
petercooper
_Realize that I have to give lecture in half an hour. Pull up lecture notes
from last year. Change "2009" to "2010" on the title slide. Skim over them and
remember that this lecture was a total disaster but that I don't have time to
fix it now. [..] Give lecture on cache algorithms to 70 or so somewhat
perplexed and bored undergrads._

I'm sure there's a little hyperbole but this was outlining a _typical_ day?
It's not a surprise the students would be perplexed or bored if taught by
someone whose passion wasn't for education. Some colleges get this right; many
get it wrong. While it's good to have experts in your faculty, you need good
educators first.

Many colleges seem only too happy to coerce expert non-educators into giving
lectures against their will, but it makes as little sense as pushing good
educators into doing large research projects..

------
grandalf
I think it's too soon to tell how things will go at Google. He seems like a
dopamine junkie (I can relate) so maybe after a few months he'll be checking
HN and Engadget from Google as well.

For a very smart guy like Matt, chances are boredom will set in after a
while... it will really be a test of Google to see if it can capture his
imagination for 7 hours a day after he's worked there 6-9 months and all the
novelty is gone.

~~~
netmau5
I clock out for lunch, is this not normal at Google?

~~~
jemfinch
I don't think time clocks are normal in our industry. Every W-2 programmer I
know is salaried.

~~~
netmau5
I'm salaried as well but I'm also expected to be at work 40 hours a week. We
have a simple time tracker which I'm referring to as the "clock" but I've
honestly never heard of a company that doesn't have at least some form of time
tracking if only for HR (vacation, etc).

------
sandee
As faculty he was,

1\. Interacting with people who are interested in commercial viability of his
research ideas

2\. Interacting with students, interested in pursuing research careers and
seeking guidance

3\. Teaching. Forming concepts in otherwise uninformed minds

4\. Coaching grad students who mostly will get inspiration from him to pursue
reasearch careers

5\. Preparing for talks.

I think the author is under-estimating his contributions back in college.

While he laments the student whose minds are un-prepared, he likes to
debug/test the code which too in the same analogy is going thorough curative
process.

IMHO, if you compare the long term outputs (ROI), his work in college would
far exceed that his does in private enterprise. Hope at some time, he could
return back to campus re-invigorated.

------
mattlong
Sounds like the author likes hacking but loathes being a professor. Can't help
but assume he's doing a huge disservice to his students by being so
disinterested in teaching that he forgets about/doesn't even try to improve
his lectures from the year before.

~~~
yanw
That's a tad judgmental, I'm sure Harvard doesn't just hand out tenure to
anyone who punches a time card.

~~~
cdavid
While geting tenure at harvard is indeed no small feat, I doubt teaching has
much to do with it. Teaching sadly plays little role in getting tenure,
especially for prestigious institutions. Grants and papers are the most
significant points.

~~~
Create
Teaching has nothing to do with it (see Brian Harvey at the bottom of the
ranks).

Papers have nothing to do with it. Really few papers are read these days. I
would guess, that an average IEEE author _writes_ the same number or more
papers than reads (write-only memory doesn't make sense).

Even less papers have an actual academic impact in CS in the age of the
internet, where bits come at the price of caffeine and inspirations of ideas
of somebody from a blog/news site (peer review comes in the comments). Not
much old-school papers, journals or libraries. As always, there are few
exceptions, but you are certainly better off playing the lottery.

Non-virtualizable science is a different matter (wet lab, electronics,
physical experiments etc.) But bureaucrats prefer in silico, because it is
cheaper.

~~~
cdavid
I may be wrong, but it does not seem like you have much experience in
academics.

I don't know any university where papers (and more especially their impact, as
measure by h index and co) do not matter a lot when getting tenure (or any
kind of post PhD position, really).

~~~
Create
They do matter, I think our experience does match. This is part of the problem
I was alluding to.

All I am saying is, that I do no longer take for granted the paper/IF (& other
Thomson ISI Corp.) science metrics as the golden standard, because it is being
actively abused (clique self-referencing, grant business etc.). This is not a
new controversy, and I think it is much like the RIAA/MP3 shift, which is not
only taking place in publishing (web daily news, kindle etc), but also in
scientific publication (NIH publication policy etc).

arxiv.org seems to be one of the best _technical_ compromises, but
unfortunately, it doesn't fit very well in the establishment's established
authoritative scheme (IEEE, ACM etc), which is a racket by anyone's standards.
And it can be misleading too (there was an ARS report on this, about the level
of trust in the result being published).

Long story short: I, for one (and I think you too) are very unlikely to get
tenure based on papers on arxiv.org about _volcanoes_ , _transportation_ ,
_urbanization_ and JIT. No matter how good we are in Linux sysadmin an
distributed systems.

Though back on topic, publication per se is what _early stage training_ is
about (and not PhD), in my experience. Of course, one can always ''downgrade''
an EST to a PhD, but then one has to go through all the post-docs, to get to
be staff again. Short of luck, of course. For those with tenure, it is very
rare to actually write papers to publish (though it does exist) -- that is
what students, assistants and fellows are kept around for.

~~~
cdavid
Oh, sorry about the confusion. I realized afterwards that you may have
actually described how it _should_ instead of the how it _is_. Maybe my
English is faulty, but I think it was important to stress this for people
outside of academia, it could be misleading otherwise.

Otherwise, I agree almost entirely with you - I myself left academia mostly
for those reasons. Whether tenure professors do write papers depend quite a
bit on the field, though - I know many professors in statistics who still
contribute significantly to papers written by co-authors (mostly grad
students, post docs), for example.

------
bhoung
Interesting. But mostly concerned at the amount of soft drink consumed.

~~~
lukeschlather
I was especially perplexed by him drinking a Red Bull to get through the rest
of the day, and immediately following that with shots of Scotch.

------
kunjaan
When I glanced over the schedule he had at Harvard, I thought it was from
PHDComics.

------
Void_
Stop drinking that Diet Coke!!! It's bad bad bad. If you're trying not to gain
weight - don't drink diet drinks. It tastes _like_ sugar and makes you wanna
drink more sugar.

Get some tea instead, you can drink hot tea, cold tea, you can add lemon or
sugar, and it's much better than ewhhh - diet coke.

------
pmorici
So now that he is at Google it looks like he is only really working from 9:00
to 4:00 (7 hrs.) at Google vs. over 8 hrs. as a prof, but in those 7 hours he
is getting much more meaningful work done.

~~~
robryan
It was to 5, just sounded like the day he was recalling they had some drinks
in the last hour, assuming that doesn't happen every day. Was also some after
hours work, not sure if that was related to his day job though.

------
thinkdifferent
I really liked this post. I know it has to be taken with a grain of salt, but
I found it a great reality check.

I also have a procastination and web-surfing ( hackernews :) ) problem with a
job that doesn't motivate me.

A guy who got a PhD, a tenure and then a job at Google had the same problem. I
feel a bit better.

------
ssn
This post should be called "Day in the life of a Harvard professor". I was
more surprised with that description. The typical day at Google is pretty much
what I would expect.

------
lylejohnson
I'm picking up on some thinly-veiled hostility from several commenters here;
does Matt have some poor reputation in the tech world that I'm just unfamiliar
with?

------
balakc
only a percent believable! But nicely written :)

