
Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student - krat0sprakhar
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html
======
haky_nash
Sergey and Larry didn't code much though. This one's hilarious:

In the book, early Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein says "I didn't
trust Larry and Sergey as coders." "I had to deal with their legacy code from
the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more
interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." One
Google engineer from back then says the most remarkable thing about the co-
founders' code was that when it broke, users would see funny error message:
"Whoa, horsey!" It turns out the developers most responsible for building the
Google that quickly became the Web's most powerful company are two guys you've
probably never heard of. The first is Urs Hözle. According to one early
Googler quoted by Edwards, Hözle was "the key" to Google's early success.
Edwards writes, "Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have
been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed
Code." The second is Jeff Dean. Edwards writes that "Jeff pumped out elegant
code like a champagne fountain at a wedding." "It seemed to pour from him
effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling
programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line
application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized
statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer
citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a
decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school."

~~~
CmonDev
Are there any samples of that elegant code available online?

~~~
sanxiyn
The best source of the early Google codebase is a talk given by Jeff Dean
himself. The talk describes Google1997, Google1999, Google2001, Google2004,
Google2007 in some considerable details, from architectural diagrams to low-
level bit packing tricks.

[http://research.google.com/people/jeff/WSDM09-keynote.pdf](http://research.google.com/people/jeff/WSDM09-keynote.pdf)

~~~
CmonDev
It's an overview of highly-optimized solutions to difficult problems, I am
more interested in elegant code (beautiful + maintainable) - this is why I
asked. Something makes me skeptical there could be any at such stage, when
shipping is most important.

------
learnyearn
Looks like 'view source' reveals the true motivation, commented out ;-)

<!--<H4>Objective:</H4> A large office, good pay, and very little work.
Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.-->

~~~
hughguiney
I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college
buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky
comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that “view source” was not as easy
as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research
it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a
hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when “frontend development” was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we
are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later
that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was
literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn’t
matter as long as it rendered correctly. It’d be like looking at a candidate’s
PDF resume in a hex editor.

~~~
wdr1
View Source was there in even early versions of browers. Mosaic had it. And
lynx had the ability to dump the raw HTML. Most people on the web at that
point also knew you could just telnet to port 80.

I would go so far to say that viewing source was the way a lot of people
learned. If you saw something on the web you couldn't figure out how to do,
you'd view source to learn a new trick.

I also don't think it would be a big deal to have a joke like that in your web
resume. Few outside of hardcore geeks were on the web. There was no LinkedIn.
Recruiters didn't use the web. Executives didn't. It was unlikely your hiring
manager did & if he did, he'd likely appreciate the humor. It's like hiding a
joke in kernel module you wrote. If they're the kind of people looking there,
they'll have an appreciation for it.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
This is the time when you came in and could quickly scan the whats new on the
internet menu on mosaic :-)

------
raverbashing
"His website is not Web 2.0 - doesn't fit our company"

"Doesn't say machine learning on his site - behind the times"

"Doesn't know Map-Reduce and Hadoop"

Yeah, I think we should pass on this candidate

~~~
smm2000
Three internships at well-known companies(Wolfram and GE), CS degree from
Stanford, knows Python - with that resume you can get 10 offers in two weeks
if you schedule interviews right.

------
Chinjut
"Ph.D.: expected June 1997."

Ah, someone else who didn't finish their doctorate and ended up working for
Google instead. We're like kindred spirits, Sergey and I...

~~~
atrilla
From MSc to PhD in 2 year's time... in Spain this is the time you are expected
to figure out what to research about. No doubt why Spain needs a bailout. So
much to learn.

~~~
eliben
I don't think 2 years is typical for a PhD (even after already earning a M.Sc)

This may be just a sign of the quality of research Sergey was doing which has,
as we know now, fairly useful applications :-)

------
runn1ng
Years later and I still haven't seen decent and working LaTeX to HTML
converter.

~~~
pcmonk
"It is unique in that it is in written mostly TeX and hence is a somewhat more
elegant design than other converters. A small portion of it is written in
Perl."

I have no conception of how any software written mostly in TeX with a little
bit of Perl could have "elegant design" as a selling point.

------
binarysolo
I know the resume is just solid for today's standards, but do keep in mind
that his research/work on data/ML is from 1990s -- and at that day and age
this was cutting edge research, and people who leveraged this gained
significant competitive advantages once they figured out how to properly
execute.

I started doing ML work in 2007-8 and even 5-6 years ago it wasn't the hot
domain yet that it is now.

------
kriro
Recruiters take note. Content >> style. He worked on some interesting projects
but the writeup would be deemed "unprofessional" and his resume would be
tossed to the bin by a huge chunk of HR departments/firms I've had relations
with.

Would have been interesting to use a slightly altered version of this for a
blind "which person would you hire" test.

~~~
frozenport
Nonesense, this is HTML from 1996. You will need to resize your browser
window, at the least.

~~~
josephpmay
I don't think the above commenter is talking about the look of it when he/she
says "style," rather he/she is referring to the way it is written.

~~~
hyperliner
_sigh_ so funny you had to actually clarify that.

------
laxatives
I think the most interesting bit is that Sergey Brin was such an early adopter
of python in its infancy. I'm guessing this resume is from 1993-4. Python was
released 1991.

edit: nevermind, from the Masters date it sounds like its 95-97

~~~
saiya-jin
well you have probably exact date in the title of document ;)

------
adoming3
His home page from his Stanford days is pretty sweet, got to love his use of
gifs.
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

~~~
hughguiney
“Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no
exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry
Page.”

This is beyond trippy.

------
cheese1756
Does anyone know what the class with him and Larry Page
([http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/))
was like?

~~~
hammeiam
That would be a great AMA

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akhilcacharya
I think its interesting that he was able to gain admission into Stanford
without having any conference papers in his undergrad years - I guess his
grades and other research made up for it.

------
zubairq
And his CV as an adult:

[http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv-
photo](http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv-photo)

------
Punoxysm
It's a pretty solid resume, but I've seen a dozen better ones that don't
belong to billionaires... Unless...

Sorry, gotta update my LinkedIn.

~~~
funkyy
Because the road to success is to copy successful people. Right?

------
msie
Heh, the Movie Rating project is cute (who hasn't done that?).

------
confiscate
if sergey and larry didn't code much, why do they care about making
engineering-centric culture, instead of focusing on the business around
engineering?

