Xooglers - Google Discussed by Ex-Googlers 211
perler writes to tell us that Xooglers, a relatively new website created so that ex-Google employees could reminisce and share, has been gaining a great deal of popularity recently. The website shares what went wrong, what went right, and all of the funny happenings in between. Quite an interesting piece of Google history.
Re:Why "ex" googlers? (Score:5, Insightful)
So easy to say about a company until you have actually worked there. Not saying that working at Google wouldn't be cool, but you never know what little things here or there might be a frustration at your job. What about an annoying boss? Hard schedule? Your employers aren't always going to accommodate you to fix a problem, no matter where you work.
News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Scroll down (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, it's not a slam on those others systems, but I feel the missing feautures debate usually gets out of proportion to actual use of said feautures by the average project by a small/mid-size business.
obvious question (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been browsing some of their early entires (and the one guy's profile that's not empty) but that detail of their google experience is never addressed. I would think that if you wanted attention for being an ex-anything, you'd at least be upfront about what brought about that "ex-" status.
So I'll reserve my trust regarding this site... for the same reason that I can't imagine a blog site of my ex-wives to be perfectly honest about me.
Consumed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
No ScuttleMonkey- it's what a bunch (more specifically: TWO. "Doug" and Ron") of ex-employees think went wrong, think went right. I've seen ex-employee websites/mailing lists and been on them. They're petty, rarely accurate (I saw wild claims made I knew were false) and so on.
I am no fan of Google, but why is anyone giving ANY credence to what two guys have to say? I see nothing to verify they are who they say they are.
I'm sorry, I must have missed something here. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if this qualifys as either "News for Nerds." or "Stuff that Matters."
Google Got Cooties (Score:3, Insightful)
'Do no evil' does not jive with 'IPO'. Once a company goes public it's doomed to image control in order to keep it's stock price looking pretty.
Re:Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen plenty of that from ex-employees as well (esp disgruntled ones, but really all of them to some extent or another).
However, the Google X'ers at that site actually seemed fairly level headed. Honestly, for the most part their descriptions make the place sound like a pretty nice place to work!
Re:Google Got Cooties (Score:4, Insightful)
Want to replace G-Mail? Try Yahoo
Want to replace Google Maps? Try MSN's http://local.live.com/ [live.com]
Replace Google Search? Try MSN live.com
MSN has been really trying to make up for lost ground recently, especially in relation to Google's services.
There are lots of alternatives to Google, it's just that Google has become the 800lb gorilla and nobody really wants to 'make the switch' away from something they're comfortable with. Kinda like the whole Windows vs Mac/linux thing.
P.S. Hotmail still sucks in comparison to Yahoo/Gmail. I only keep it around because I've had the same address for at least 8~10+ years.
I'm going to start SATooglers.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Stock option dropouts (Score:4, Insightful)
Tech startup stock option millionaire dropouts engineers are a rarity these days. One of their tendencies is to cement their genius reputation by publishing a personal account of their heroics and lamenting the sad decline of the company - after cashing out ofcourse. Good examples are Mark Andreesen, Jamie Zewinski, and Andy Hertzfeld? Any others?
Did you actually read it? (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't a small business using mysql because they don't need features, this is google, and they needed features that mysql didn't have. They used stupid and unsafe hacks to partly work around it instead of simply using a real database.
Of course it was a pain to move to a real DB after the fact, that's why you shouldn't do things wrong in the first place.
Re:Opening a Window to Google.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why "ex" googlers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or perhaps Google simply censors those who don't say good things about google (and if you don't think firing people for speaking has a censoring effect on free speech I've got a bridge to sell to you).
Re:Scroll down (Score:1, Insightful)
BTW, it's not a slam on those others systems, but I feel the missing feautures debate usually gets out of proportion to actual use of said feautures by the average project by a small/mid-size business.
You "feel"? Here's the thing: data management is one of the few parts of computer science that has a solid and complete theoretical foundation. You can and should do better than "feel".
The fundamental purpose of a DBMS is data integrity. MySQL had no declarative integrity rules, no triggers to simulate them with, not even basic foreign key constraints. The only possible reaction you could have is, "what good is?" On top of that, MySQL had no views (not even just read-only), no subselects, and would silently transform data in and out of the database.
Imagine a programming language with no functions or subroutines (analogous to the missing views), random value casting (silent corruption), no user-creatable types (no integrity constraints), no parentheses (no subqueries), and so on. Sure, you could do *something* with it, but what's the point? Just get another product that's just as free, just as easy to use, but can also do all the missing stuff.
This has nothing to do with the size of a business, it's just the utter lack of competency most IT people have with regard to data management. A lot of those MySQL databases are accidents waiting to happen. Heck, a lot of Oracle database are too, but at least the few DBA's who know what they're doing have the tools to do it with.
When it comes to data management, there's a simple rule of thumb: whatever the vast majority of people say or do is flat out wrong. Learn more about the theory and you'll be unable to come to any other conclusion.
Re:If you read the stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I was just trying to make an example. I have plenty of experience with C++.
"First of all, a GC isn't not a magic cureall. Second of all, there is GC support for C++. Third of all, this is programmer induced race condition, it's a rare kind of error."
Well, in this case, the race condition was between the GC and the other thread. In a multi-threaded lisp, that problem would be eliminated; it just couldn't happen. You could have race conditions, but not between the GC and a thread. In this case, it would have been a cureall.
"Because programmers shouldn't be careful, right? And a person who makes a mistake isn't at fault for the mistake even though THEY made it?"
Well, that's why a C++ programmer gets less work done; he has to do tasks that a LISP programmer doesn't have to deal with. In this case, the performance penalty of a LISP, over C++ would be negligible -- so overall, the C++ programmer loses. An assembly programmer also has to manage a bunch of mind-numbing details -- but there's no reason, a priori, to say that a job has to be done with such a tool. If you say the solution must be done with a less powerful tool, then you need to get people who are good at managing such low-level details, and who feel content getting less accomplished.
Also, you talk about the problem as if it were being solved by a single programmer. As Ron makes clear, there were multiple programmers. So using C++ imposes more costs: the programmers have to talk to make sure they don't fuck themselves with little implementation details. If they were using LISP, they wouldn't need to talk about how to avoid the problems, so they'd get more work done.
"Using LISP doesn't remove the risk of making mistakes. It just forces you into a less powerful language and ends up giving you a headache, all for the sake of avoiding some trivial programming error."
What's the headache? Also, why do you say "less powerful"? I'm really not getting your point here. LISP is a more powerful language, because it has closures, a GC, arbitrarily complicated macros, runtime compilation, etc. Since the 1970's, Common Lisp has been faster than Fortran for problems where performance matters.
Furthermore, if you will argue that "C" or C++ is faster than LISP, because you can do machine-level things, then I'd ask why you just don't use assembly, to get the most "power". Whatver "C" has, assembly has more of it, right?