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I am a software engineer at Google; my posts do not represent my employer.
I was only there in 2022, but at that point there were in fact three or more monorepos (forked roughly based on toolchain - go and scala in one, primarily Ruby in the one detailed here, and there was one for the client stripe api libs that was JS only. There may have been more.
I just killed Reddit off my home screen after a decade of usage because of a totally different bullshit growth hacking thing - they have started injecting their “recommended” subreddits into my swipe stream.
I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they’ve ever put in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I’m super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I clicked through an r/bestof link.
Sigh. Now I need to actually figure out Mastodon.
Yeah; my product team will get wildly different priorities over the course of a month as execs spin plates, PMs and managers scramble around, and we nail down what our next round of experimentation will involve. On top of that, relying on A/B testing for all decision making means you’re liable to discover at any point that there’s a totally different piece of software that you should have built instead.
It’s all chaotic, but I enjoy the scrum.
This is very on point. We have platform and product in entirely different reporting structures that meet just below Sundar; this leads to hysterically different cultures. My team is trying to straddle the product/platform divide right now and it’s a constant learning experience.
A recent example: someone asked me for my team’s planning schedule, specifically when we figure out what we will be doing for the next six months.
My only response is “we don’t do that here”; my team has to constantly juggle projects to load balance downtime on projects (most of our work is very sinusoidal in how much time it demands in a week), and we pick up new ones that are important enough to add to the load from time to time.
The platform folks set out in December last year with a mission for all of 2021; the design is flexible, but they know exactly what the goals for their year are.
When one team has projects that take an arbitrary amount of time to “get right”, and the other has more reliably predicted cycles that just depend on coding output, things get a little hairy. Mostly just takes a lot of empathy for the folks on the other side, though.
My old gig was at Lawerence Livermore (home of Edward teller); there’s a photo of the sedan test with a few lab engineers posed next to it in the building that they interview new comp sci hires in. One of the senior engineers I was on an interview panel with told me all about Plowshare; weird to hear it from someone who wasn’t on the project.
Timezones. It’s hard enough scheduling meetings across multiple timezones (and boy are there a lot of meetings in FAANG), but going more than +/- 6 is a huge pain (I meet with east asia and europe on a fairly regular basis).
There are a variety of European climate agencies; depending on what country you live in / are interested in being in, there's:
- UK: Met Office https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/careers/vacancies)
- France: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace https://www.ipsl.fr/en/ (their job page is busted)
- Germany: Max Planck Institute https://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/institute/opportunities/
- Netherlands: KNMI https://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/organisaties/ministerie-v...
I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones that I've worked with in the past. European climate research agencies seemed to have their act together a lot better than US ones; before I left the industry, they were much further on the path of moving computation to the commercial cloud (instead of trying to keep up in the supercomputer arms race, which always seemed like a losing proposition to me), and I think ML has been increasingly integrated into climate models as a way to approximate complex dynamical systems.
In terms of which of these labs had their head screwed on straight from a technical side, it was probably KNMI / Met Office, followed by Max Planck and then IPSL.
It’s L4 as of like a year ago; also going up to L5 no longer has promo committee per-se, but instead is a PA meeting between leads who hash it out, and the manager is much more involved.
Yeah, but one of the main roles of pretty much every government is regulating what is sold in their markets.
(Were this a less autocratic regime,I would have said "governments are just people", but I take your point on the government of SA being largely disjoint from the citizens)
It's actually a reference to the USB-C ecosystem for the laptop line; Marco and his cohosts on the Accidental Tech Podcast have burned a lot of time griping about the state of connecting things to a laptop. Not so much time on the head phone jack, which was mostly a no-op for them (since it was paired with the airpods).
The front-end interviews at Google are about half algorithms and half details about how web front-ends should work, be structured, web technology problems, browser performance, etc. It's an entirely different interview track from General SWE.
Almost definitely not the case at Google presently. 80-90% of the fridge space is dedicated to non-soda beverages (flavored seltzers, cold brew coffee, iced teas), and the chips + candy are hidden out of sight in the snack areas.
When ordering at a restaurant, yes.
As an owner of a car with ACC and lane keeping, I frequently get to experience the always fun sensation of my car accelerating full bore at a turn. My understanding is that Tesla actually made the two systems talk to each other, which is definitely not the case in my Honda. Calling it "just" ACC and lane keeping is disingenuous.
As an additional piece of anecdata, I was also thoroughly underwhelmed by my offer (software engineer) at Tesla; they either maliciously or incompetently tried to get me to take an offer at new grad rates, and when I laughed the first offer away (a 30% pay cut to move into the heart of silicon valley), the return offer was just strictly worse than all the other offers I got. Negotiation led to a promised increase to match, but then the actual letter was lower than the negotiated amount. Was thoroughly underwhelmed at the entire process.
I can report that the climate scientists I knew mostly worked on macs (laptops, largely; a variety had trash-can Mac Pros as well). Fairly sizable motivator was the Unix CLI; they all had come up working on supercomputers with C/TC Shells, so having that locally was a big win.
On the bandwidth end, both Android and iOS do use incremental updates ([1], [2]); if the changes are something that you would be releasing eventually anyway, you're not wasting any bandwidth, and are instead loadbalancing it over multiple payment periods.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/07/23/new-play-store-tools...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1779/_index...
... no need to make a NASA pen
As is frequently trotted out whenever someone reaches for this analogy, http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp (tl;dr: pencils aren't great in space, another company invented the pen on their dime and sold it to NASA). There's definitely UX headroom when iterating on user input; the first gen touchbar has been undeniably meh, but that's not to say another iteration or two can't be a marked improvement over a 150 year old technology.
For those in one of the covered regions[1], Kaiser Permanente is largely not-evil. You have to go through your GP to get referrals to specialists, but it's a series of mostly consistent "I have X problem" "Try Y" "Didn't work" "Try Z" "Didn't Work" "OK, let's get you to a specialist" events.
They have an interesting governance structure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente) that tries to align incentives correctly.
[1]: Coverage areas as divided by corporate entities:
Northern California
Southern California
Colorado
Georgia
Hawaii
Mid-Atlantic (vicinity of Washington, D.C., including Maryland and Virginia)
Northwest (Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington)
Washington (except Southwest Washington)Also, they controlled for language and the effect was still present.
I had a phone screen with a start up in the middle of my last job hunt where they let me know they were in the middle of porting their entire frontend to React + Redux, while rewriting their backend. I was "unable to find time" to meet with them further.
Grover Norquist is also the basis of one of my personal engineering mantras:
"I don't want to abolish dependencies. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Presumably a reference to the long history of the symbol prior to its appropriation by the Nazis.
Top left:
Table ____
Bottom left:
NRW Bug: He who sends ____ (wrong?) data
Top right:
Kitchie Boo Boo Bug: He who ____ around errors in relays
Bottom right:
He who brings good data
> Safety - they'll be safer. Period.
No. I don't think so. Not in the foreseeable future at least..
According to the NHTSA[1], they already are.
>* It's a natural extension for cos like uber - how else can they bring costs down enough?
I don't know or care.
The point is that they're dumping money into the tech for their own purposes, regardless of effectiveness as a consumer product
> It meshes well with other aspects of tech reducing friction - deliveries will be cheaper (think dinner, groceries, taskrabbit)
Well, why do you think the providers will reduce the cost? They can always add to their profit, instead of making the service cheaper.
I sure hope they do; I'd doubt any of those comapanies make any profit as is. And again, they'll be willing to spend lots of money on the cars, making them a viable product without the consumer market.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig...
He was a director, so a lot of his job was coordinating the entire development tools team. He fit in some amount of development during the day, and did a lot of nights and weekends (or at least that's what I've been gathering from the interview so far; only part way through, looking forward to the commute home).
I homebrew as well, and this always floats around as something I'd like to do. Then I picture hauling 55 pound grain sacks up a catwalk and dumping them into the grain mill, for a mid-to-low margin business. Sigh.
On LAN, this is basically how Symantec Ghost works; it multicasts the image over UDP, and each client figures out what they missed. Those chunks get retransmitted at the end.
My old strategy for this involved a cronjob to update my host file every five minutes, so I could edit the file and read for a few minutes when I legitimately was waiting on something to compile, but would get yanked away from the browser black hole and back to work in a reasonable amount of time.
Then I got a better job, and now I feel a lot less compulsion to sit and read the internet.
My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.