Slacy has a fantastic post about what Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots, but what I really learnt about it, was what life at Google is like as an engineer. 🙂

If you're too lazy to read the article, here's the bullet points:

1. Lotsa meetings (duh)
2. Lotsa time spent compiling and fixing other people's code (for C++ devs)
3. Open-source software (or pretty much anything not invented at Google) frowned upon
4. Shitty cluster management system for scheduling jobs
5. Datacenter mayhem for deploying apps
6. If your product isn’t a billion-dollar idea, then it’s not worth Google’s time.
7. “unGoogly” system designs get shot down because they didn’t use Bigtable, GFS, Colossus, Spanner, MegaStore, BlobStore, or any of the other internal systems.
8. 20% time is a lie
9. Ignore the good ole 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil'
10. “Google Scale” is a myth (Google Search (the product) requires vast resources. Almost nothing else does, and yet is constrained and forced to run “at Google scale” when it’s completely unnecessary.)

Anything else you want to add to the list?

No Comments »