Slashdot Mirror
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.
Than finding fault in what people choose to do.
news at eleven.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'm sure he's pushing his own brand new technology, Sour Grapes
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Does an obsession with following a certain set of methodologies always benefit the bottom line?
Sig: I stole this sig.
The original paper from google was "MapReduce" of which Hadoop is an open source implementation of the concepts described in the paper.
http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
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
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.
While I know google doesn't require apologists, I always have a little chuckle when I read articles like this. So what if it's 10 year old tech, it seems to be working well for them. Sour grapes and a healthy serving of plug-my-own-products.
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
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
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.
To be honest, it sounds like a guy who thought that he knew best, and wanted to just mash bad code out... Google told him to write good code or fuck off... he chose the latter.
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.
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.
The fat is that Google's products, by and large, work. If the whole damned thing is floating on top of Pentium IV's with 2gb of RAM, or whatever, does it matter? It's a moronic position, and clearly one formulated as an excuse to show how superior what he's doing is. What a prick.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sounds like to me that Google's all grown up now.
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 thought the real insight in the article came from the piece about the coding culture. Staking out territory and maintaining complete control of the design and implementation of systems. If that's the case, is it any wonder the systems are obsolete? The way I see it, this article is really less about how antiquated Google's systems are, and more about how pig headed the culture can be. Made sense to my feeble warped mind anyway.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The big lead isn't the equipment. It's the AdSense algorithms. This guy is blowing smoke out his ass.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It matters because successful organizations often don't feel the need to continue innovating. "After all Google Is print money, why change?" And small little problems start cropping up. This feature becomes difficult to maintain. This product starts to lag behind the competition a little bit. But all of it can be ignored since they're still so successful.
Eventually some little whipper snapper comes along and eats their lunch (usually founded by 'sour grapes' ex-$organization members).
It becomes particularly problematic when a single organization starts to establish fiefdoms. Microsoft being the obvious case study. You can't add XYZ to ABC because it'll compete with UVW. It's good to have competition but you don't want to stifle disruptive technology since your competition won't be so accommodating in disrupting your existing product line.
Maybe what you have is working. But someone out there is cooking up something that's not just working... it's better. If you're in the lead you have to start competing with yourself.
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
And the only thing that comes to my mind is: If Google manage to get its revenue and performance from ancient technology, I don't even want to imagine what they can do if they... well, upgrade.