
Google's first employee - dirtyaura
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970
======
pg
I took more notes the first time Craig spoke at YC than I've done with any
other speaker. Most of the time I only write down one or two sentences. The
first time Craig spoke I took 4 pages of notes.

~~~
dirtyaura
I think stories by early employees of successful companies are often the only
way to see the messy truth of early stages. Founders are so involved in many
aspects that constant self-observation is not possible.

At least books by founders highlight the big lows and the big highs, but there
are many insights to be gained from smaller daily decisions or way of making
them, and I think employees can remember better how was the daily life in the
early stages.

~~~
pg
I've found this too. We also had Shel Kaphan speak, the first employee at
Amazon (and really de facto cofounder), and he was very good as well.

~~~
swah
Reminded me of [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-
things...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-
smart.html):

"It's modeled on the early successes I've witnessed at Geoworks, Amazon, and
Google, all of whom had one thing in common: they hired brilliant seed
engineers."

~~~
seiji
After re-reading the post, this sticks out prominently:

"I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of
obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers
(exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of
Google's engineering culture."

Is it Craig?

~~~
swah
Dunno, some folks in the comments also mention Jeff Dean.

------
ardit33
"A There are these cultures you see in some companies -- they are just very
negative, where the way that you show you are the hot shot engineer is by
showing how stupid everyone else's idea is, or how bad everyone else's code
is. And honestly, we see that more at Google now then we used to when it was
small. And part of it is we've got people who were used to these other
cultures; it's a very prevalent, sort of alpha-dog culture you see in the
programming world. But it's never been part of Google's culture. And I think
even when you see it now, it's not as respected. The respected voices say, hey
cut it out. "

\--That's very true. What I have seen in large companies, looking good is
important, and apart from building stuff and bragging about it, and even
easier way to do it is by criticizing others, and finding any way on how to
point at minor flaws on other's people's work, simply malignant / non
constructive behaviour, but masqueraded in the name of 'quality', company
standards etc..

~~~
duhprey
Here's a very tiny "company" anecdote. I'm volunteering on a remake of an old
game for fun. So far I've been the only programmer. I've had conversations
with two other programmers who considered joining, and the conversations went
similarly. That they seemed eager to tell me about something I was doing wrong
and needed to do differently. I'm not really against that (even less if it
comes with a patch...) but I guess it was the delivery that got to me.

For instance, in one conversation the first thing the other programmer said to
me (after chatting with the guy introducing us) was "I've found tons of bugs
in the build." My initial reaction was "well duh" :) But it didn't really set
a good tone for the rest of the conversation. Haven't heard back from either
of them. But it got me thinking in part about why I had such a negative
reaction to it, but also what draws people like that. I figured it was because
it's a game, but after seeing this I guess it's common in the industry (I'm
not sure if I should be happy or sad).

Perhaps it's because we're working in relative anonymity on this game and a
large corporation has a similar feel that it still would remain only there. I
hold out hope.

------
colbyolson
I'm not sure if the parent link works or not, it didn't work for me.

I believe this is the article linked.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/pr...](http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=16291970&siteId=568)

Edit: Nevermind, now it wants to work. Although I did link to the print
version, incase anyone wants that instead.

~~~
cskau
I had problems with it too, but got this working:
<http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970>

~~~
pasbesoin
Yes, you need to drop the query string from such URL's. This has been the case
with at least one other recent Mercury News post.

------
jganetsk
I started here at Google NYC not too long ago, and was surprised to find Craig
inconspicuously sitting at a desk across the room, tapping away at his
keyboard. Some folks around here don't even know who he is.

------
michael_nielsen
Silverstein's old Stanford homepage is here: <http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/> Interesting to get some idea of what his
background was when he went to Google.

------
s1rech
I remember one article of Steve Yegge in which he wrote that for the most part
the engineering culture at Google came from an early employee. Is this
actually the guy?

~~~
swah
One of the authors of the MapReduce and BigTable papers would be my guess:
Jeff Dean.

------
jscore
He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs.

I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

~~~
smanek
Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the
SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450
and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).

~~~
nostrademons
Most smart people I know also got a better than ~1400ish score on the SAT, but
a disproportionate number are also in the near perfect range (~1570-1600). I
can definitely tell the difference between a 1400 and a 1570, and can usually
tell the difference between a 1570 and 1600.

~~~
JMStewy
I find myself very skeptical of your last claim. According to the research my
friends and I did when taking the SATs, the difference between a 1570 or 1580
and 1600 was often a single question.

The scoring scale varied a bit based on the difficulty of the particular exam
you sat, and as we were aiming for scores near the top of the scale we hoped
to get an exam that allowed a question or two wrong to still get a 1600. Often
one question wrong on verbal would still score 800, math was less forgiving of
a single mistake.

I have trouble believing there could be any distinguishable difference in
practice between the population of students who got two questions wrong on the
exam and those who got one wrong.

~~~
nostrademons
There's fairly little difference between someone who gets two questions wrong
on the exam and someone who got one wrong. There's usually a fairly large
difference between someone who gets two wrong and someone who got them all
right.

On the modern (post-1995) SAT, 1600 is a fairly wide range, from people who
got 1-3 questions wrong to people who breezed through the whole test, double-
checked everything, and didn't miss a single question. If you're talking to
one of the latter, you'll know it.

~~~
bd
You are right.

According to Wikipedia, SAT 1600 (post-1995) is 99.93 percentile, so about 1
in 1429 (3.4 standard deviations).

Given that there are millions of people taking SAT, in absolute numbers there
should be plenty of people hitting the test ceiling.

Interestingly, pre-1995 apparently had much higher ceiling, with only 1 in
142,857 getting score above 1580 (4.6 standard deviations).

Which BTW means Microsoft was founded by some really crazy dudes.

~~~
zach
Exactly. This is what Craig means when he says he got a perfect score when it
meant perfect -- he got all the questions right.

For example, I took one of the SATs of that era (before antonyms were
removed), missed only one question on the math section but still got a mere
770. I got over it.

------
hasenj
Firefox says the connection is untrusted and refuses to open the page.

~~~
brown9-2
Just refresh, it seems to work and not work randomly.

