The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/melody_meckfessel_google/all/

by lingben • 13 years ago

52 70 13 years ago

tippytop2• 13 years ago

I'm sure Ms. Meckfessel is a lovely person, but this is clearly a PR driven piece pumped out of Google for recruitment purposes.

Throughout this entire NSA scandal people lament there's nothing we can do, but these tech companies are vulnerable to talent shortages. A simple action for a conscientious hacker is to simply not work for PRISM collaborators. Apply your talents to companies willing to make privacy assurances.

rryan• 13 years ago

PRISM collaborators

You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

EthanHeilman3• 13 years ago

You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

1. Or work in areas which do not handle data that the US requires by law. You can find software jobs in the US that do not require collaboration with governmental domestic spying. For instance many people choose not to work for companies that build weapons of war for a variety of reasons. These people can still work inside the US.

2. Additionally non-US residents work for Google. Being outside the US doesn't really have much relevance to the discuss.

3. I also reject the notion that Google had no choice. Google may have been able to comply with the letter of the law without giving up user data by using e2e cryptography. One can support or question their actions, but they are not powerless victims in this drama but active agents that can be held responsible for what they do.

tippytop2• 13 years ago

There is something these companies allowed that went beyond others, Twitter is not listed for example. As Snowden pointed out [1], these companies need to make some kind of technical assurances for privacy, otherwise customers (and potential employees) should look elsewhere.

[1] "The [telcom] companies should write enforceable clauses into their terms, guaranteeing their clients that they are not being spied on. And they should include technical guarantees. If you could move even a single company to do such a thing, it would improve the security of global communications. And when this appears to not be feasible, you should consider starting one such company yourself."

fpgeek2• 13 years ago

You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

What makes you think you don't have to comply with US law if you work outside of the US?

If you're a US citizen living and working abroad, it will quickly become painfully clear exactly how much work you have to do to comply with US law (and how severe the penalties are if you don't). And US citizen or not, you might be surprised at how many non-US companies elect to comply with various aspects of US law for business reasons.

infrec• 13 years ago

What do you mean by PRISM collaborators? I am genuinely curious because I feel like I missed when/where that was established.

To my understanding, and please correct me if I am wrong, PRISM isn't a system that companies subscribe to, but more of a government portal for requesting information from a number of companies in a legal fashion. Is this not correct? I admit I have not kept up with all of the bits of information released due to the high volume of speculations generated by just about everyone that talks about it.

EthanHeilman3• 13 years ago

We still don't really know what PRISM is or how it functions. It does appear that US companies did provide overly broad information to the US government using the following logic.

1. The US government gets massive amounts of information from these companies and can get this information in real time with no oversight,

2. none of these companies seem upset about it, which one imagines they would be if the US government was just stealing it without their permission,

3. and these companies have cooperated with the governments misinformation campaign (denials of "direct access" and such).

If they aren't responsible for initially giving them access, they are now responsible the governments continuing access since they have learned that the government does have access and they have not attempted to prevent the government from maintaining access and furthermore they have aided the government ability to maintain access by stifling public outcry about this access by lying to their users.

codex• 13 years ago

Given the secrecy surrounding PRISM, is there any way to know whether a company has been recently forced to comply with a PRISM-like program? Snowden's data is already stale, and only covered the largest companies.

jimzvz• 13 years ago

...this is clearly a PR driven piece pumped out of Google for recruitment purposes.

Agreed, can someone point me in the direction of some tech writers that aren't afraid of journalism?

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

The chick in charge of the Internal Tools team? That shit is widely regarded within Google as a dead-end ghetto, devoid of opportunities for promotion and looked down on by the other focus areas.

- 5+ year Ex-Googler

EDIT: I'm done with this fucking site. You won't have weareconvo to kick around anymore.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

This is a spiteful and misogynistic comment - you do yourself and this community, a large disservice.

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

No, it's not. It's the truth.

eblume• 13 years ago

Agreed. Even if it's true, I hope that the HN community can all agree that comments like this reflect poorly on us -- lets certainly not reward them.

wikiburner• 13 years ago

Just curious, how offensive is "chick"? I catch myself accidentally using it every once in a while (a vestige of shitty, all-boys Catholic high schooling). Should I be mildly embarrassed or mortified?

ionforce• 13 years ago

I doubt you would have said the same thing if the post started with "that dude" or "that guy".

eclipxe• 13 years ago

How is it misogynistic?

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

Calm down a second. You're obviously taking offense of the phrase "The chick in charge of the Internal Tools team?". While the word is often used in the fairly female hostile line of "I'm off to pick up chicks", it also has a very common usage for an (attractive) young woman in certain demographics.

As far as I can tell, the OP is not trying to make a misogynistic comment on purpose and biting his head off and shouting at him is not going to help the community, or the OP, or your point. If this was an actual misogynistic comments - "A girl in Google? Fire her!" - then the outrage would be well placed. A very commonly used colloquial term, however, at most deserves a polite request to use better language in future.

mixmixmix3• 13 years ago

Once upon a time the word "misogynistic" actually had real meaning.

But, thanks to mostly people like you, that word has been hugely trivialized to mean not much more well... than anything really.

Let's not burn the OP at the stake just because he used a word that you think is somehow improper. That's something you have to deal with all on your own.

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

yep, i've seen too many times how such things happen at various places to imagine that it can go any differently:

"... she brought a “product perspective” to Google’s developer tools, insisting that, although they were only used inside the company, they should be treated like like products used by the world at large. “She bootstrapped a new charter for the team,” he says. “We had to think of these as products used by other Google engineers — and she brought that attitude. We had to think of them as cohesive things, to give them a nice presentation. That had not been the focus before.”"

focus, perspective, think of as product, bootstrap, charter, cohesive, team... 7 large ones in BS-bingo.

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).

The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.

kgrin• 13 years ago

You can make the point about tools being a dead end (which I have no particular insight about, so I'll take your word for it) without being unnecessarily dismissive of the individual as a "chick".

shadowmatter• 13 years ago

As another year ex-Googler, I'd say this is BS. Everything that superseded the "gconfig" days was pretty amazing, and IIRC the team behind it in NY did quite well for themselves. Steve Yegge wrote GROK, which is an internal tool, and I'm pretty sure no one around here looks down on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

I think the fact that I worked there for over 5 and a half years should afford my opinion a bit more weight, but as I despise the Argument By Authority fallacy, I'll concede that any other Xoogler should be able to chime in and contradict me here.

magicalist• 13 years ago

Steve Yegge is probably a better example, but another that comes to mind is that Guido wrote the code review system there. He left for dropbox, but he was at Google for years, so clearly something was worth the 50% or whatever of his time left over from python dictatorship duties.

In an earlier comment, OP mentions leaving Google before Go was released, which was quite a while ago now, so not sure why he felt the need to chime in. He just sounds like he wanted to be an asshole, honestly.

ezy• 13 years ago

I don't get this. You mentioned in a subsequent comment that it's hard to be promoted inside google unless you "release", then go on to trash others by saying that Tools has unnecessary releases.

So is this something problematic about Tools, or about Google's culture in general? It sounds like you're criticizing the idea of using "releases" as a benchmark when inappropriate, yet you are disparaging someone else's work (what would you do?) because they have to adapt to the (dysfunctional?) corporate culture… Seems like making the best of a bad situation.

As far as relative status goes, "hackers" need to care a little bit less about other people's accomplishments or lack thereof. I've heard this kind of trash talk before (both direct and indirect) too many times in tech circles, and no matter how justified you may think it is… it just reflects badly on the person saying it.

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

I'm mocking the situation:

- Promotion is largely driven by launches

- Erego, people launch unnecessary shit

- That's ridiculous

- ???

- The New Hangouts

spudlyo• 13 years ago

I would gladly give half my karma to downvote this comment into oblivion. I wouldn't have thought that this kind of dismissive misogyny would stand on HN.

aresant• 13 years ago

Although it's from the distance past (1995) this article sheds a bit of light on the word "chick"

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

And several people and sexes are well represented with their very individualized take on the meaning of the word.

In my experience in Southern California "chick" is more or less synonymous with "dood" when referring to a third-party casually.

However it was probably a poor word choice to comment on an article that many seem to interpret as a gender discussion piece.

weareconvo13• 13 years ago

...any comments about the actual content of my post, or are we just going to talk about my odd use of SoCal surfer idioms for a while?

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

EDIT: I'm done with this fucking site. You won't have weareconvo to kick around anymore.

com'n, man! From high moral ground these lemmings here tar-n-feathered Swartz, and you're getting emotional over their inability to hear word "chick" without getting their heartbeat racing and palpitation.

circuiter• 13 years ago

Relax and hang around. Those complaining are most likely poseur male-feminists. They might as well protest in 'chick-lit' sections of bookstores.

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

The Wired article talks about internal tools used to compile code. In line with that, there is an interesting video "Building Software at Google Scale" [1], which seems to give an overview of the systems used.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qv3fcXW1mg

dnautics2• 13 years ago

really, a story about a prominent female engineer, and the first paragraph is about how she dresses? I'm hardly a feminist, but this is kind of rediculous.

mseebach• 13 years ago

In context, it's actually pretty relevant. The anecdote, like the piece itself, is about how she deals with being a woman in a very male dominated world. Dress is one of the most direct and tangible differences between men and women.

dnautics2• 13 years ago

I'd disagree. But even if it is the "most direct", whatever that means, you don't think that there are more serious gender-assumption transgressions in the tech world? It's a little annoying to me that the first anecdote is the most superficial one.

I give the writer a pass, if Melody herself insists that that's the most important issue, or if that was, chronologically the first thing that Melody brought up.

sltkr3• 13 years ago

It's not so much a story about an engineer who happens to be female, as it is a story about female engineers, the gender gap, and general lack of diversity in engineering. Considering dress is one of the most important gender expressions in our society, why shouldn't it be mentioned in an article about gender differences?

By the way, if I were Melody Meckfessel, I'd be more concerned that the WIRED editors managed to misspell my name twice in one article.

voidlogic3• 13 years ago

The other key thing, according to Meckfessel, is that the system compiles code with unusual speed. In typical Google fashion, it spreads compilation tasks across vast array of servers, rather than generating the executable software on the developer’s local workstation.

I hope she has more than this to focus on as Go usage is picking up within Google. And with Go, just the local workstation can do it. :)

cromwellian2• 13 years ago

That's only because the amount of Go code is small. Google builds all transitive dependencies from source in HEAD, so if there were 10 million lines of Go sitting in the repository, your local workstation won't cut it.

It's not even the build times which are the most pressing issue these days, but the time for tests to run.

nostrademons2• 13 years ago

One of the major design goals for Go was that incremental compiles should not require a rebuild of all dependencies. I believe they bake interface information into the library files for this reason. If you don't change a file, you shouldn't need to rebuild it.

If you sync to a later CL, you might need to rebuild what's changed, but even then all this should be cacheable across the company. Go was designed as a language to avoid a lot of the mess that the build tools have to deal with for C++.

sltkr3• 13 years ago

I like Go, but I always thought that was a ridiculous selling point. Just look at your own comment: if Googlers are picking up Go, it must have been for other reasons than build speed, considering they have a compile farm at their disposal that can build millions of lines of C++ code (before or after preprocessing, I wonder?) in mere seconds.

I have a suspicion that if you ask people who used Go why they chose that language over the many other available options, almost none will say "because the compiler is fast!"

voidlogic3• 13 years ago

I agree. I was approaching from the angle of being amused that they obviously put a lot of work into making C++ compile reasonably fast when they created a language that, amongst other things, addresses that issue by addressing the actual causes of slowness (as opposed to some giant cluster). I agree that for very few people compilation speed is "their" winning Go feature. (Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run)

The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds

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