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.
Why "ex" googlers? (Score:4, Interesting)
If *I* get a Google job, I am never leaving!
hrm (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why "ex" googlers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Never say never. As Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". Suddenly, working for Google (or some other great company) may not seem like great idea as before because your interests have shifted, or you may wanna spend more time with your family.
Re:Why "ex" googlers? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
So he goes to Google because they have some LISP guys there (not using LISP -- just smart guys) -- and then he gets told to do the first Java project. And later he gets told that LISP is out of the question.
And in fact, he details how a race condition in the C++ memory management leads to them billing clients nonsense amounts -- a problem that simply couldn't happen if they'd used a language like LISP (or Java) -- because the GC wouldn't reclaim something if the thing was still in use.
So Google can yet be beat -- they are not perfect. Of course, that doesn't mean there is anyone to beat them, yet.
Get with the times boys (Score:2, Interesting)
What reason other than to ride on the crest of Google's success can there be to wait until now to write this? Sure, some of the things are interesting, but something a bit more current would be more newsworthy - this is 'News for Nerds' maybe in 2002, but history now.
Why I'm giving credence to what 2 guys have to say (Score:2, Interesting)
His Blogger profile even links to his homepage. Xooglers is not some anonymous blog; it's written by people using their real names and at least one of them has a decent track record as a software developer. I haven't even seen any particularly negative remarks in Xooglers posts, except for self-deprecating remarks by the authors! Why don't you actually try reading TFB instead of spewing bile?
Blogger (Score:2, Interesting)
Want to hurt Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
Early adopters of Google may have, for the most part being looking for a better search engine, but what sold Google to the masses was far simpler.
The masses seek simplicity.
(1)Google, the name is as simple as baby talk. The name, Google, while carrying its math connotations, is friendly in a silly, simple way. MicroSoft, like a cowboy wanting to see his brand everwhere, would do well to let go of MSN and brand its search engine with something akin to Google. Yahoo has some similarity in simple, attractive terms, but Google is bunny cute.
(2)The colours Google employs are engaging in a primitive simple way as is the name Google. If I were competing against Google I would go with simple attracting colours that held out a similarity to finger painting. Again, Google employs simple, childlike colours that are reminescent of kindergarden and hold out a process of searching that is as simple and fun as fingerpainting. Google's cartoon representations of Christmas, Easter and other notable days again are made to make the Google search experience childlike in simplicity. It's Google's eye candy that pulls in the common searcher.
If I went up against Google I'd start out by licensing something like Paddington Bear [paddingtonbear.co.uk] to signify a safe site for children. Paddinton's raingear suggests safety and what's more child safe than a teddy bear? I'd employ other brightly coloured images, say a red rose for personals, etc..
Icon's dominate windows on the desktop, the same iconographic point and click simplicity would do more to drive inroads into Google's domain than better tech.
Unfortunately Google's competitors, like Google itself is driven by wringing every penny from every resource to support stock price. Public companies can only do evil, like the wicked witch in Snow White, they stand before the mirror and ask "mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose stock price is the prettiest of them all", and, what they offer to their users is a bright, rosy, red poisoned apple to put them to sleep.
RTFB (Score:5, Interesting)
While those outside Google might disagree with the ultimate decisions the company has made, they should know that those decisions were not made without reflection on the consequences. One of my goals with Xooglers is to expose the nature of that debate. I agree with Matt that providing more transparency into how difficult decisions get made within the Googleplex can only enhance the brand. It's not enough to say you're not evil; you need to show the world how you define evil and how you choose to avoid it.
Well put don't you think? Indeed a large portion of slashdotters tend to believe Google is the messiah and that they are not an 'evil' company. But let's face it, 'evil' is different from person to person and to vaguely portray one company as evil and another as not is ridiculous. To many, MS won't seem evil - after all, a lot of people use their products and are damn satisfied with them. To still others, the fact that Google supports OSS means nothing and they want only excellence of product (BTW don't start a tangential reply about MS products not being excellent blah blah).
The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been. As an aside, there is a raging debate in the hacker community about the overall economic merit of the open source model. (Making money producing free software is quite a challenge.) I am not taking sides in that debate here. All I am saying is that from the end user's point of view free software is often much better than the producers of commercial software would like people to think.
Again, a good point - there are some OSS that are good, others that aren't. But what I want to point out is that Google did go for non-OSS software at one point - suddenly, it seems like Google was making a decision from the standpoint of "What would be best for us?" (the fact that the ACTUAL decision they made was wrong and they returned to OSS later is irrelevant BTW) correct? Indeed, they are a business. While no one here can likely say for certain, we certainly shouldn't assume that because of Summer of Code or other opened material that Google is supporting OSS (btw I am not an advocate of OSS nor am I an opponent, so please don't think I am being biased) or that it is "not evil".
My 2 cents
PS: When people bring up databases and talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, they often ignore some other big players: MS's SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Don't start a thread about the different relational databases half-assedly plz.
Re:Scroll down (Score:4, Interesting)
If you dig further, you'll find a post [sitereservation.com] about a multithreading race condition that boggles my mind. Maybe I've no imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where that's a good idea. It's not even something you can do unconciously! The explaination is also unsatisfactory, which leads me to believe that perhaps the fog of time is clouding the whole story somewhat?
The trouble with Google: they're an ad agency (Score:5, Interesting)
If they'd gone private instead of going public, they could have been a very profitable near-monopoly, sustained by the fact that it doesn't really cost that much to run a search engine, and thus, their ad content can be minimal. But now they have to produce a reasonable return on investment for their overblown market cap. So they have to add more and more advertising-oriented services, from catalogs to classifieds. This dooms them to become more like their competitors in those spaces.
It's not going to be fun to work there as the profitabilty vise closes.
Re:The trouble with Google: they're an ad agency (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:If you read the stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
See below.
"Stack variables" in C are variables local to the function (and parameters). To access the local variables within another thread you'd have to perform some very specific kludges to obtain a reference into another thread's stack..."
Actually, I think the problem is that it is very easy for a C++ programmer to get ahold of a pointer to stack-allocated data. No special tricks are required. I suspect this is how their program was (from reading the article carefully):
void period_writer(char *p){
void spawner(){
char[BIG_ARRAY_SIZE] x;
spawn(periodic_writer, x);
for(;;){
}
main(){
wait_for_all_threads_to_finish();
}
In this case, there are two threads -- the initial one that calls spawner and the one that gets spawned to run period_writer. Periodic_writer receives the pointer to the data to periodically write out.
Everything works, unless spawner exits too early, deallocating the buffer shared between the two threads. It isn't at all hard for spawner to pass the stack-allocated data to the thread, making it very easy to make this error -- no specific kludges are required.
To do it in a LISP (or just Scheme) with threads:
(let ((x (make-vector size)))
(spawn (lambda ()
X won't get deallocated prematurely in a multi-threaded implementation.
"If I understand your language correctly, what I understand to be happening in their C++ multithreaded system was bluntly impossible to do in LISP. You can't have the problem, because you can't solve it that way.
Right -- you can't solve it in such a risky fashion. And if you do something bad, the GC will keep around the data -- it won't allow some other thread to write in to the space. And in the event one thread writes some crap there that the other thread isn't expecting, you'll likely get a type error and the system will halt -- it won't just proceed blindly ahead with garbage.
The only way I can think to duplicate the error is if you allocated some bytes and treated them as untyped bytes, arranged to store/retrieve data in the untyped bytes, implemented a stack and duplicated the concurrency error in the C program. The nature of the language is such that you can't screw yourself if you do the normal thing, which is just to use lexical scoping to share the variable.
The typical C++ solution is to use shared globals and accurately protect them. I suppose there could be a kludge workaround to what I'm saying, but the general point I was making was that it's a kludge in C/C++ too. Trying something like that in a multithreaded LISP environment isn't something on my todo list, however."
Actually, they said they stored the shared data on the stack, as in my example. As long as you know that the thread with the data on the stack will always exit after any uses, that's going to work, and it isn't kludgey. As for it not being on your todo list, if you've got a lisp available, it won't be more than a few lines -- it isn't nearly as bothersome as the C++ version.
But hopefully this one case shows you why Ron was of the opinion that he could get work done around 10x faster with LISP than C++. Tracking down the bug probably cost them a lot of time and stress.
Re:Not good enough. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why "ex" googlers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Any successful business is just that...a business, and all the adolescent fantasies of corporate ski trips and pool tables in the break room aside, work has to be done. A job at Google is not a panacea for the workaday blues. I'm sure it's a very nice and creative environment, but I remember a lot of dot-com companies that sneered at traditional business practices, opting instead for lavish salaries, non-standard work hours, jacuzzis in every office, and multi-million dollar IPO parties. We all know where they are now...how much is that theGlobe.com stock worth now?
Not to say that Google is such a company. They obviously have their heads on straight, but don't kid yourself into thinking that no one in his right mind would ever want to leave, because Google ain't perfect.
Let Them Eat Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is doing a fine job sucking up talent. Not just the big fish like Cerf, but the more clued individuals in our industry. Working at Google has become something of a status symbol, something akin to having a CCIE. Oh, you worked at Google? You must be good. I've noticed one thing that results from this. There seem to be more senior positions open in the Bay Area, New York, everywhere Google has significant footprint. Too, the annual salaries for these positions has risen about 20%, presumedly out of demand.
For that, I can say ... thank you Google!