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Xooglers - Google Discussed by Ex-Googlers
perler writes to tell us that Xooglers, a relatively new website created so that ex-Google employees could reminisce and share, has been gaining a great deal of popularity recently. The website shares what went wrong, what went right, and all of the funny happenings in between. Quite an interesting piece of Google history.
I assume that being a Google employee represents the highpoint of your career and you would never want to leave...like one of the xooglers says, why become a boring specialized cell when you can be a stem-cell and take on any and every challenge thrown at you?
If *I* get a Google job, I am never leaving!
post only mentions the good things, in fact he seems wistfull of his time there, although he does allude to bad things in a previous post. wonder if the tone of this website will change in a few years time
You'll see there's a lisper who left JPL because managers decided to follow "best practices" of industry and move to C++. This is despite the fact that programming a space mission isn't a "standard" problem -- it is, in fact, a problem that a language like LISP is excellently suited, because people can deal with unclear/dynamic requirements as a project evolves.
So he goes to Google because they have some LISP guys there (not using LISP -- just smart guys) -- and then he gets told to do the first Java project. And later he gets told that LISP is out of the question.
And in fact, he details how a race condition in the C++ memory management leads to them billing clients nonsense amounts -- a problem that simply couldn't happen if they'd used a language like LISP (or Java) -- because the GC wouldn't reclaim something if the thing was still in use.
So Google can yet be beat -- they are not perfect. Of course, that doesn't mean there is anyone to beat them, yet.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
From the blog: '..when I left Google in October of 2001..'
What reason other than to ride on the crest of Google's success can there be to wait until now to write this? Sure, some of the things are interesting, but something a bit more current would be more newsworthy - this is 'News for Nerds' maybe in 2002, but history now.
"Ron" is Ron Garrett, nee Erann Gat. He used to work at JPL, where he created an autonomous spacecraft control system which was named NASA Software of the Year. His homepage has a list of his publications, and you can find his Usenet postings with Google Groups, if you like (he used to post quite frequently in comp.lang.lisp).
His Blogger profile even links to his homepage. Xooglers is not some anonymous blog; it's written by people using their real names and at least one of them has a decent track record as a software developer. I haven't even seen any particularly negative remarks in Xooglers posts, except for self-deprecating remarks by the authors! Why don't you actually try reading TFB instead of spewing bile?
Does anyone else find it ironic that this blog is hosted on Google owned Blogger.com?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
Early adopters of Google may have, for the most part being looking for a better search engine, but what sold Google to the masses was far simpler.
The masses seek simplicity.
(1)Google, the name is as simple as baby talk. The name, Google, while carrying its math connotations, is friendly in a silly, simple way. MicroSoft, like a cowboy wanting to see his brand everwhere, would do well to let go of MSN and brand its search engine with something akin to Google. Yahoo has some similarity in simple, attractive terms, but Google is bunny cute.
(2)The colours Google employs are engaging in a primitive simple way as is the name Google. If I were competing against Google I would go with simple attracting colours that held out a similarity to finger painting. Again, Google employs simple, childlike colours that are reminescent of kindergarden and hold out a process of searching that is as simple and fun as fingerpainting. Google's cartoon representations of Christmas, Easter and other notable days again are made to make the Google search experience childlike in simplicity. It's Google's eye candy that pulls in the common searcher.
If I went up against Google I'd start out by licensing something like Paddington Bear to signify a safe site for children. Paddinton's raingear suggests safety and what's more child safe than a teddy bear? I'd employ other brightly coloured images, say a red rose for personals, etc..
Icon's dominate windows on the desktop, the same iconographic point and click simplicity would do more to drive inroads into Google's domain than better tech.
Unfortunately Google's competitors, like Google itself is driven by wringing every penny from every resource to support stock price. Public companies can only do evil, like the wicked witch in Snow White, they stand before the mirror and ask "mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose stock price is the prettiest of them all", and, what they offer to their users is a bright, rosy, red poisoned apple to put them to sleep.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
A lot of you are pointing out that these are just random ex-Google people (or even that we have no proof they ever worked there) but there are some good points brought out in the articles. I think the majority of posters who are complaining about the blog or the accuracy of a blog are just randomly posting in hopes of points/Google-whoring rather than actually reading what was linked to. That being said,...
While those outside Google might disagree with the ultimate decisions the company has made, they should know that those decisions were not made without reflection on the consequences. One of my goals with Xooglers is to expose the nature of that debate. I agree with Matt that providing more transparency into how difficult decisions get made within the Googleplex can only enhance the brand. It's not enough to say you're not evil; you need to show the world how you define evil and how you choose to avoid it.
Well put don't you think? Indeed a large portion of slashdotters tend to believe Google is the messiah and that they are not an 'evil' company. But let's face it, 'evil' is different from person to person and to vaguely portray one company as evil and another as not is ridiculous. To many, MS won't seem evil - after all, a lot of people use their products and are damn satisfied with them. To still others, the fact that Google supports OSS means nothing and they want only excellence of product (BTW don't start a tangential reply about MS products not being excellent blah blah).
The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been. As an aside, there is a raging debate in the hacker community about the overall economic merit of the open source model. (Making money producing free software is quite a challenge.) I am not taking sides in that debate here. All I am saying is that from the end user's point of view free software is often much better than the producers of commercial software would like people to think.
Again, a good point - there are some OSS that are good, others that aren't. But what I want to point out is that Google did go for non-OSS software at one point - suddenly, it seems like Google was making a decision from the standpoint of "What would be best for us?" (the fact that the ACTUAL decision they made was wrong and they returned to OSS later is irrelevant BTW) correct? Indeed, they are a business. While no one here can likely say for certain, we certainly shouldn't assume that because of Summer of Code or other opened material that Google is supporting OSS (btw I am not an advocate of OSS nor am I an opponent, so please don't think I am being biased) or that it is "not evil".
My 2 cents
PS: When people bring up databases and talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, they often ignore some other big players: MS's SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Don't start a thread about the different relational databases half-assedly plz.
Context is everything. MySQL originated as a flat file backed database. Something quick and dirty that got picked up by a few php coders. Naturally its SQL syntax was incompatible and the implementation lacking. By 2000 it had grown up somewhat but was still somewhat scary; fast but not what I'd call safe or transaction oriented. You'll note in the post that they claim they never got it as fast as MySQL. Probably because they went with something "Real" (Oracle's a good a guess as any) that did transactions and considered recovery from failure.
If you dig further, you'll find a post about a multithreading race condition that boggles my mind. Maybe I've no imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where that's a good idea. It's not even something you can do unconciously! The explaination is also unsatisfactory, which leads me to believe that perhaps the fog of time is clouding the whole story somewhat?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
If they'd gone private instead of going public, they could have been a very profitable near-monopoly, sustained by the fact that it doesn't really cost that much to run a search engine, and thus, their ad content can be minimal. But now they have to produce a reasonable return on investment for their overblown market cap. So they have to add more and more advertising-oriented services, from catalogs to classifieds. This dooms them to become more like their competitors in those spaces.
It's not going to be fun to work there as the profitabilty vise closes.
Excuse me? I've lost count of the number of NDA's I've signed over the years but one thing that I do know is that violations of the law are not subject to NDA and revealing such information to the authorities is covered by the whistleblower statutes. The public good has nothing to do with your comment. Your duties under the law do.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Google is doing a fine job sucking up talent. Not just the big fish like Cerf, but the more clued individuals in our industry. Working at Google has become something of a status symbol, something akin to having a CCIE. Oh, you worked at Google? You must be good. I've noticed one thing that results from this. There seem to be more senior positions open in the Bay Area, New York, everywhere Google has significant footprint. Too, the annual salaries for these positions has risen about 20%, presumedly out of demand.
For that, I can say ... thank you Google!