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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.

20 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Former Employee Has Chip on Shoulder... by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 4, Funny

    news at eleven.

    --
    Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
    1. 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.

      --
      Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    2. Re:Former Employee Has Chip on Shoulder... by dudpixel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wave was misguided. It had really cool tech and it did have potential...

      but where they failed was they couldn't even tell people HOW to use or even WHY they'd want to.

      I thought of things I could use it for, but when telling others about how it worked, not only could I not explain it well (who could?), no one really saw the point of it.

      FAIL is an understatement.

      --
      This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
    3. Re:Former Employee Has Chip on Shoulder... by MrAngryForNoReason · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think this is the lesson we can all learn from Facebook. To succeed a technology doesn't have to be particularly well built or ambitious in solving problems. It just has to be easy enough to use that everyone can understand it and use it without too many problems. Facebook has so many users because it can be summed up in very simple terms, 'it's for sharing photos with your friends', 'it lets you see what people are doing'.

      Google Wave may have been a technological marvel and a solution to all kinds of problems but when it launched no-one knew what it was for, so nobody bothered using it.

  2. Re:MapReduce vs Hadoop by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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

    --
    Sig: I stole this sig.
    1. Re:I wonder by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ideally you'd pick the best solution for the problem every time. The problem is then that you end up with very many solutions, and you need ideal people who understand all of them.

      Methodology is a way of narrowing down the variables, here we do it this way and that's what you need to learn too. That way developers become more flexible and components more reusable.

      Then you go too far and try banging the square peg in the round hole. Obsession is not good. Total lack of methodology is not good. As usual the answer is somewhere in between, that kind of fuzzy answer nobody really likes.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. 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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    Read radical news here
    1. Re:Haha by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My thoughts exactly. He sounds like someone in academia land - the same guys who think that most industry players are dinosaurs for not using Haskell and similar bleeding edge stuff.

      In truth, all big players have to be reasonably conservative in the adoption of technology, because otherwise the risks become unmanageable. For example, Google standardized on Java, C++ (or rather a fairly conservative subset thereof), and Python - all mature, established platforms. On the other hand, Google does actively participate in development of those; not sure about C++, actually, but they definitely have a strong presence in Java development process, and Python - well, Guido is a Google employee. And then there is experimental stuff, such as Go, being slowly adopted.

      Few companies can boast being that far ahead from the bulk (think of all the companies still on Java 1.4 for in-house development, for example). If he's not content with this arrangement, then he shouldn't work for a company of that size in the first place. Find some startup where they can implement crazy ideas just like that, just to see if it works or not (and possibly fail if it doesn't, but on that size, who cares?).

  5. Academia v. industry by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Academia v. industry by back@slash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Was going to post something similar. I've observed that at some point most developers go from "must always use the latest and greatest" mindset out of college to "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mindset that comes with a few gray hairs. Just like any company Google would need to justify the cost of upgrading to newer technologies against any new capabilities the technologies would enable to either save costs or drive new revenue. If that cost can't be justified they could be running on existing technology for a long time (of course ensuring that you can hire people that know enough about these technologies is another story..)

      --
      This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
    2. Re:Academia v. industry by kangsterizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Does it matter?
      The point is, Google was once pushing technology. And now, they are not, at least, in these very fields.

      None of your I-like-Google post goes against what the guy says. In fact, you're supporting his claims.

      Neither are bad things - but I can understand an engineer who wants to use the latest tech or invent new innovative tech instead of using 10 year old stuff.

  6. Seriously? by fyzikapan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Translation by crow_t_robot · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Translation by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seriously, I read "resigned from Google" and had to take a few minutes to get my mind around that concept. Especially if he was a coder. They treat coders like demi-gods.

      Well, maybe that's the problem: He didn't want to be treated as mere demigod. :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  8. Actual Link by batrick · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye

  9. 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.

    --
    Murray Todd Williams
  10. Re:MapReduce vs Hadoop by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  11. 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.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  12. Re:MapReduce vs Hadoop by Idbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.