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Ex-Google Engineer Blasts Google's Technology
lee1 writes "Dhanji R. Prasanna, an engineer who recently resigned from Google, describes Google's famous back-end infrastructure as a collection of obsolete technologies, designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers. He blasts MapReduce and its closed-source friends as 'ancient, creaking dinosaurs', compared with outside open source projects like MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. He also criticizes Google's coding culture, which has become unfriendly to hacker types due to the company's enormous size." I suspect that most people would be happy to have company infrastructure problems as pressing as Google's, though.
Wait.. isn't MapReduce just a framework and Hadoop one of its open source implementation? How is the former a 'creaking dinosaur' as compared to the latter?
Than finding fault in what people choose to do.
news at eleven.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Don't they mean "Hadoop MapReduce?"
Porquoi?
At best, he's lost the plot.
Google still does a totally amazing thing in as-good-as zero time.
The essence of hacker coding culture is not giving a damn what everyone else is doing and doing things your way anyway, unfriendliness be damned and ignored.
Does an obsession with following a certain set of methodologies always benefit the bottom line?
Sig: I stole this sig.
An ancient creaking dinosaur on the largest distributed system in the world is still big enough to EAT YOU. - www.awkwardengineer.com
He obviously didn't fit into the culture and completely missed the point of Google's infrastructure. They make great use of old tech. Instead of throwing it away because it can't process as quickly as the new top of the line, it processes what it can. There still isn't a solid commercial product that does what Google's infrastructure does. Hopefully one day we'll all be there.
the guy got so accustomed to good that his standards seem to have perpetually got raised. he thinks google's state is 'bad'. lucky him.
Read radical news here
This guy seems to have never lost his academic mindset, it's not at all surprising, or bad really, that Google is keeping around old technology. Guess what, they have this thing called operations where they pretty much have to be up 24x7 so that they can serve customer requests. They cannot just start dumping infrastructure that:
a) work and
b) they have invested significant amounts of money in
just because some new technology came around. If everybody in industry did that, it would be absolute chaos and nobody would be able to get anything done. This is just as true in computers as it is with steel mills.
Now compare this with academia, where they have no real customer base to speak of. They can constantly push the boundaries, try new technologies, change their infrastructure etc. That seems to be where this guys mindset remains.
Note that I'm not bashing academia as being out of touch with "reality" or anything like that, the entire POINT of academia is to push these boundaries, industry exists to take these advances, combine them with their own, and then deploy them in an operationally efficient manner.
Monstar L
U Mad Bro?
All companies of any age have obsolete tech. Everyone here knows this.
The shouts about sour grapes and so many people defending google are strange from a group who knows this.
10 year old tech? My last job was using a bunch of stuff originally built in the 1970s! This guy needs to get a grip on reality. You don't throw out something that works, even if it's a bit kludgey sometimes, simply because there's some fancy new thing.
Heaven SUCKS! The noise of all the angel's wings flapping is making it difficult to truly enjoy my harem of supermodels, swimming pool filled with wine and diamond roller skates! I'M OUTTA HERE, SUCKERS.
http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye
Wrote former burger flipper Ferd McFaddle in his blog.
Gently reply
His book on Dependency Injection is one of the few recent computer books I had to go through carefully, and with notepad and highlighter in hand. His work on Google Guice is really notable. This ain't just some Microsoft-bound disgruntled guy.
But it's not necessarily surprising. I'm not very familiar with it, but Google's Wave was one of those allegedly killer technologies that just didn't get the corporate support it needed to reach its potential as a disruptive technology. Still, there's a possible tone of sour grapes here. Hard to know.
I'll just say this: I would love to have the privilege to work with someone of his caliber.
Murray Todd Williams
designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers.
Well duh..
I think many other companies would be happy to have remotely 'ancient, creaking dinosaur' technology. I ponder to think what the authors opinion of infrastructure technology in the rest of the world that would be lucky to be only 15-20 years old.
Citing MessagePack is certainly surprising as that particular technology is significantly worse than Google Protocol Buffers, the website is littered with bad test procedures and many errors. Google's serialization doesn't have the speed of say TIBCO's QForms or the compactness of Reuters RForms but it is pretty clear from their documentation that flexibility and easy management were preferred goals over utmost highest performing technology.
All my ex'es blast me too. And for good reason. According to them.
The moved on to another loser of their own making. How's that workin for ya, honey? Gotten through his six months worth stupid stories yet? Ask him how he likes your hyena-like laugh. Later, babe. See if your latest will move you into your new trailer. Love your new hair.
ps - Hackers struggle in almost every corporation. Something about breaking stuff and not valuing availability over innovation. So do I want a hacker mentality ruling at my bank? Depends. Keep them away from the transaction system and the website, so I can get in and get my money, ok? The ops guys hose it up enough already.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I worked at a company where the people deploying Hadoop were like him. Most everyone doing actual work wanted to strangle them while yelling "it works fine, stop upgrading every other month and causing hundreds of hours of unnecessary work." Especially since most of the changes made things worse (read: bug testing, who needs bug testing) or added features no one wanted. But they were "cutting edge" so the academic minded fools in charge just kept putting them into production. The features that would have helped productivity were of course too boring for them to bother with.
Because a simple name-value pair object & array data serialization format is wayyyyyy better than a distributed data storage and retrieval system. Right...
To blog is sublime
Despite his complaints being slightly out of touch with the realities of the antquities that keep modern businesses running (we still have a useful fax machine where I work, and send bills with stamps by snail mail), I can see why someone would come to such conclusions. We seem to be living in a era of shorter and shorter, product release cycles. It seems everytime I read a news article or press release there is always a newer version of a product being released, or software being updated with new version numbers. There are so many "updates" it is hard to keep up with what products and what changes and features are being introduced. It is also strongly marketed that if you don't have the latest version of something you are somehow missing out. To me it seems like a psychological disease of our own making. I wonder what type of psychological stresses and consequences/costs these shorter release cycles are causing in the general populace? Personally I would prefer if things would slow down just a little for sanity. I have not lived long enough to know the pace of development say 100 years ago, but in my short 40 years of life it does appear that development is happening at a faster rate than say 20 years ago and my dad thought things were moving pretty fast then.
my 2c
chances are he's just another frustrated genius type, pissed off that everyone else couldn't (or he thinks, wouldn't) see everything his way.
Often such arrogance goes hand in hand with hubris as he comes up with amazing stuff that sounds great, perfect in theory, but fails somewhat in the real world where we all know imperfection is good enough.
Maybe he was kicked out, maybe he left. either way, now's his chance to do all that wondrous stuff he dreams of. Slating Google is just unproductive.
He will see the point in using those "obsolete" (read stable) technologies in 10 years: the goal of business is to make money, not make work by constantly upgrading.
I think I see what he's getting at. In the past few years, a few people have gotten rich doing something really dumb, but popular and scalable. Angry Birds, Farmville, and Twitter come to mind. (Not Facebook; there's a lot of heavy machinery behind the scenes making that go.) Google hasn't been doing that kind of thing. Some people think that's a problem.
In reality, Google has exactly the opposite problem. They've been frantically introducing cool "products" that don't make money. Meanwhile, quality has slipped over at the search engine, which generates almost all the revenue.
Basic truth: ads on a search engine are presented when someone is actively looking for something relevant to the ad, which means there's a reasonable chance of a sale. Ads on almost everything else are annoying interruptions. Google is in a really good business, one much better than "social". It's worth bearing in mind that Facebook only generates about 15% of the revenue of Google.
So having APIs which let people do quick little apps isn't going to affect Google's bottom line much. Sorry, hacker types.
chances are you just made a bunch of stuff up.
Sounds like to me that Google's all grown up now.
I currently work with a person like this. He worked to get everyone who knew what the hell was going on off the project. Now he has it and has no vision of what to add in. He considers all the 'older guys lazy and unmotivated because they do not want to add a bunch of stuff in'. Uh no we know just add a bunch of shit in makes for long hours for very little gain. Show me a iteration plan that does what you want and then we will talk. Smart guy though. And when he calms down will actually make a good developer.
Typically it is jealously that they didnt think of something and it all needs a total rewrite.
Google wave had the same problem many of these cool things have with them. If you have to explain it your already done. It doesnt work right. I show people a scanner app and THAT they get instantly what they can do with it. Google wave not so much. It was an answer in search of a good problem. It looked cool though. Then they automatically signed everyone up for it. Which made everyone instantly hate it. Yeah his ego was probably bruised pretty hard by that one. 'How dare they not like it why are people so stupid and not seeing the thing I spent the last 2 years working on isnt the coolest thing ever'. Then to get 'big failed project' hung around his neck in a geek culture like that. Yeah I bet he had some biting words on the way out. While the rest were thinking 'dont let the door hit your ass on the way out'.
Haha fuck you, Dhanji. Google wave didn't die from lack of corporate support, it died because it was utterly fucking pointless.
"describes Google's famous back-end infrastructure as a collection of obsolete technologies, designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers."
Is this supposed to be a problem?
What makes Google money? Search and search ads.
Mature technology designed for search engines by a company with a billion in revenue per year from search ads is probably very good for making money from a search engine.
Google has had a number of failures, and they do seem to have a hard time pushing out obvious updates and improvements to many of their products. Think about what it says if a company with 26000 employees can't keep a services like Wave going and instead suffers the embarrassment of killing it off three months out of beta.
The reason you still see so much tech coming out of Google is because they have hired a large chunk of the best coders in the world. Google has so many good employees and so few core products that it can be argued that they are actually not working very efficiently.
I am jealous, as I’m reading this on IE6 running on XP. Now I have to back and fix that stupid bug in the COBOL code that runs on our main frame.
His book on Dependency Injection is one of the few recent computer books I had to go through carefully, and with notepad and highlighter in hand
Is that a good thing? Personally, If I am going through a book closely with a notepad and highlighter, I am either:
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
This isn't a good thing. Dependency injection is another garbage pattern thats trying to work around the design flaws of Java as a language.
Sometimes there are key phrases in books that summarize a concept well... I like to highlight those. Sometimes something in the book is related to another concept that I'm aware of in another book or in another chapter, I'll make a note of it. If you don't mind marking up a book, which I rarely mind, it's a great way to read... Taking notes while you read can help retention, and it can make it convenient as either a reference or something to cite later in your own work.
That way in the future when you go back to that page, you don't have to scan all of the text on the page about the history of the concept to find what you need to know...
What did you expect ?
If you must keep something running then updating the entire architecture every couple of years is expensive (and plain stupid)
Upgrading requires a realisable benefit and a budget.
I have an acquaintance who works in a company that sells spares to the military and get this, they make a fortune selling unused MFM and RLL hard drives that have been properly stored.
Device X works, whats the problem.
Once again, upgrading requires a realisable benefit and a budget.
I say the same sort of thing to people who want a computer.
For most people an Atom processor is more than capable.<BR>
You do not need an I7 processor to surf the net or use word! <BR>
If you're not playing high end games or video editing, save hundreds and go for the low end processor<BR>
I know some will see this as a flamebait or something, but the real "sluggish, overengineered Leviathans" in their system is Java.
Come on, everyone knows that the Internet runs on technology invented in the 80's and later incrementally upgraded while still being backwards compatible.
You know you're using robust technology when people start abusing it for purposes which the original designers never thought of.
Anyone notice this is an article from the Register? Anyone bother to read the actual blog post where these quotes were taken? You know, the one where he actually goes off on what a wonderful place Google was to work and how much he enjoyed working there? Of course not. So much easier just to talk nonsense about what a jerk this guy is.
More likely at Apple. Apple fanboys hate Google more than they hate Microsoft these days.
Clever signature text goes here.
a bit unrelated to the original post, but I've switched to duckduckgo as my primary search engine a while ago. To name just a few perks: - search results point to https pages first, if there are any, - you can search with ! (bang) whatever you want - !youtube or !images - you get to any linux man page with !man keyword - duckduckgo does NOT profile your ass to eternity and back Google is so yesterday and obsolete.
.Play.Open.Minded.
Google's "Caffeine" update to their search engine actually scrapped MapReduce because they want to do real-time indexing, which is not feasible with a batch system like MapReduce.
That never occured before. Employee trys to build sth on an infrastructure not created for it and fails. Instead of positively saying: "ok, thats not the right place to do it", he says "this place is wrong totally".
I mean, i would be a little bit nervous if googles software infrastructure was significantly younger than 10years.
I think for infrastructure its not unusual to use technologies from 20years back, and only introduce new things very slowly.
I spread the quip: "Google technology makes huge problems possible, and all problems hard."
Changing those fundamental technologies is anathema to the culture there.
Since all problems are hard, only big problems are worth tackling. They will miss trying all the small solutions that could become big solutions.
First, I would strongly disbelief anybody who is leaving company and bad-mouthing. There is no respect to such people at all. And he also probably violates NDA.
Second, I am hands-on on the GWT and I think the guy is just an idiot. They are not any sluggish, but the opposite. We built a number of software with GWT and we think this is a great way. jQuery? He is either does not understands what he is talking about or thinks people are morons.
Of course, there are discrepancies and people are moving. Even you left Oracle (the most proprietary, restrictive and fear treating company), still keep your fucking mouth shut and say only what is either good for people or refrain to comment.
You want fun?
Apply for a software engineering or systems engineering job at Google and see if you can get a phoner with a member of the GMail team. You will sustain an injury as you fall of your chair laughing at how the interviewer describes to you how GMail is "designed," as if it really were "designed."
Google is a superb search engine, but that's about it.
Kriston
his whole point is that for the hacker in him, google wasnt a good fit anymore.
two reasons.
1. horizontal achievers who jump around to get this done dont get as much recognition as vertical ones who bolt down on one tech/task at Google.
2. Google's need to stabilize on technologies clash with his needs to be nimble.
and he made those points fairly gracefully. he made it clear it was about fit.