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Ex-Google Engineer Blasts Google's Technology

Posted by timothy on from the or-is-it-just-sour-grapes dept.

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.

5 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder by ModernGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does an obsession with following a certain set of methodologies always benefit the bottom line?

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  2. Re:Former Employee Has Chip on Shoulder... by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not just former employee:

    As a member of the Google Wave team, Prasanna helped build the search and indexing pipelines for the ill-fated effort to reinvent communication on the web

    Probably angsty nobody liked his baby.

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    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  3. Haha by unity100 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Don't dismiss Dhanji's street cred as a developer by MurrayTodd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Murray Todd Williams
  5. Re:MapReduce vs Hadoop by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Renegades. They're the non-team player types that shoot from the hip (without drawing), and fly by the seat of their pants. They're the most dangerous and reckless type of employees you can have. Oh, and the concept of a contingency plan? It doesn't even cross their mind. If you ask, you will get the typical "what ever, please..."

    If you have a renegade for a boss, leave your company, like yesterday. Trust me on this.

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    Life is not for the lazy.