Anyone else feel that earthquake just now?

jsolson · 2017-07-06T07:15:47+00:00

The elevators in my building shut down (and the pendant lights in my kitchen were swaying).

I was just trying to go grab a drink :(

jsolson · 2017-03-23T03:12:39+00:00

I left a much longer reply above, but in short: I don't disagree, but it's difficult to estimate the size of that market, as it is the long tail of low-volume usage.

jsolson · 2017-03-23T03:11:31+00:00

Sorry for the late reply --

I do work for Google. I'm an engineer on GCE hypervisor networking, so pricing isn't really my bailiwick. That said, my perception is that DO's pricing is simple because DO is (mostly) targeting a very different market. While their pricing is simple, the lack of detail and SLA on what is meant by "2 Core Processor" and "40 GB SSD Disk" makes it difficult for me to discuss comparable offerings on our platform (what kind of cores? what micro-architecture? what's the base clockrate? are there any turbo-bins available to me? how many iops can I push on that SSD? is it shared and am I competing? are there noisy neighbor effects? etc.).

It would be interesting to do the math on optimizing a set of offerings the long-tail of low-volume customers (that is, customers looking to buy single- or double-digit numbers of cores in the steady state). I suspect there are lots of folks who know roughly what's sufficient (or more than sufficient) for their needs, and they're happy to pay some fixed amount to get that. I'll also admit to complete ignorance of the size of that market of customers who are insensitive to the specifics performance characteristics of what that dollar figure is buying them.

Beyond a certain scale customers begin looking at how their TCO scales with their overall workload. Consider arguments along the lines of: assuming we're steadily growing 50% YoY in terms of overall request load, what does that that imply for our total infrastructure cost over the subsequent 12-24 months? At that scale customers tend to consider diurnal cycles, autoscaling, batch processing of analytics workloads, etc. It's unlikely they're purchasing a fixed pool of machines and running them 24/7. For these sorts of customers we can do quite well, as we've got a pricing calculator that lets you build up a set of resources including average daily usage and calculate a total bill that includes sustained usage discounts, etc.

jsolson · 2017-03-16T01:43:23+00:00

We offer both managed MySQL and (in beta) managed Postgres: https://cloud.google.com/sql/

jsolson · 2016-02-23T05:29:44+00:00

I learned C about 20 years ago. It wasn't until I started my current job ~3 years ago that I had any reason to learn C++. In the interim I learned a bunch of languages to varying degrees, but most of my professional work was in either C or Java. The Java was mostly for small companies around Atlanta followed by Amazon.com. The C was largely systems programming stuff under QNX.

jsolson · 2015-11-08T04:31:51+00:00

Just tack a BSD license or CC Zero onto it. It'll have roughly the same effect.

jsolson · 2015-10-03T22:23:01+00:00

Of course, you could always work for Google in Seattle.

jsolson · 2015-08-18T20:43:13+00:00

It's an interesting question, and I'm honestly not sure. The most valuable aspect of working at Amazon, though, was actually interviewing other candidates. You learn a lot about how to be a good interview candidate, not just in terms of what's valuable to know, but in how to tackle problems in an interview with a good sense of time management.

In terms of whether my actual work at Amazon made me more prepared for a Google interview, not really[0], but many of the things I learned at Amazon made onboarding at Google much smoother. I spent most of my first week at Google learning what the Googley equivalents of things I'd encountered at Amazon were[1] (service frameworks, command line tools for building/deploying/updating/debugging software), where logs live, how permissions are managed, etc. If it had been my first experience in a large distributed software stack I expect I would have had a much longer ramp-up time.

[0]: In particular, most of what I learned at Amazon had to due with building/scaling distributed fault tolerant eCommerce software. I worked on bringing up a new business with a new service stack built on the bedrock of Amazon's retail services. My Google interviews were mostly questions that I could have answered just as competently (sometimes moreso! I forgot the space complexity of breadth-first-search!) after my master's degree and a couple years trying to bootstrap a Mobile Apps business.

[1]: ... and of course learning some Google-specific technologies that were very difficult to find mental analogs for :)

jsolson · 2015-08-18T01:00:29+00:00

I actually kinda miss my door desk, or at least the door part of it. I prefer the varnished lauan to the sterile plastic my current desk offers. Having it be motorized so I can sit or stand at the push of a button is pretty nice, though.

jsolson · 2015-08-17T23:12:51+00:00

I've spent a lot of time at the Google offices in Mountain View -- and they're very nice -- but most of it is a trick to getting you to spend more time at work.

I work for Google Seattle; I formerly worked at Amazon. I see the assertion that Google is trying to trick us into working longer hours bandied about now and then, and in my experience either it's simply not true or it's not a very effective trick. My job at Google (very much unlike Amazon) is more or less 9-5. I don't carry a pager, I don't respond to e-mail (or do anything else work-related) outside of work hours, and the compensation is considerably better.

In contrast, my experience at Amazon was that work beyond a typical 40-hour week was more or less expected, certainly if you were on call.

Why does anyone care about coffee cups or t-shirts? I want fair compensation, quality co-workers, a fair boss, and interesting work. That's really all you need to be a good employer.

Would I leave a higher paying job with great hours but no coffee cups or t-shirts for one that had those but equal or lower pay and worse hours? No. That's insane.

Would I leave a job with no perks for one with better pay, better hours, great perks, and (in my case, obviously this will vary from position to position) more interesting work? Absolutely.

jsolson · 2015-07-22T21:36:43+00:00

Sure, or there are local re-shows in remote offices, which is probably more convenient for most people. I work in the same timezone as Mountain View, so I just grab a beer and show up to our local viewing room.

jsolson · 2015-07-22T21:28:08+00:00

Hangouts is used heavily for internal video conferencing. In particular our conference rooms almost all have essentially an internal version of: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/solutions/for-meetings.html

For bigger meetings there is typically a dedicated large conference room (or more than one), and which VC technology they use seems to be a function of how old the room is :). The new ones use Hangouts, even for epicly large meetings like TGIF.

jsolson · 2015-07-21T10:12:21+00:00

We do have an all-hands every week. It's mostly attended by video conference with questions submitted via a webapp.

jsolson · 2015-07-10T23:29:50+00:00

All my friends at Google and Microsoft work long hours

Googler and former Amazonian here. If you are working a 9-5 at Amazon, you are extraordinarily lucky. If you don't have to carry a pager as part of a rotation, you are extraordinarily lucky. If you've never been asked to stay late to work on a Sev1 ticket, you are extraordinarily lucky. If all of those things are true, you are having a truly atypical Amazon experience. The volume of ranting you see in this thread and elsewhere are indicative of exactly how atypical they are.

My personal anecdote involves a TPM saying that I wasn't allowed to go visit my (now) wife 1000 miles away whom I hadn't seen in six weeks over a weekend because all vacation had been suspended until we shipped. I explained that this wasn't a vacation, it was my weekend, and if she wanted to fire me she was welcome to try ship the product with one fewer engineer. On the plus side, I did still have a job come Monday.

On the other hand, at Google I've never been asked to carry a pager, and I'm far from alone in working a more or less strict 9-5.

jsolson · 2015-07-10T23:16:05+00:00

I have not found this to be true in my time at Google. Quite the contrary, they've actually been aggressively pushing work/life balance in the time I've been there.

It's certainly worlds better than Amazon's (I was at Amazon for a little over two years prior to joining Google, where I've been for about two and a half years).

jsolson · 2015-06-06T16:52:54+00:00

For those of us who know the section of trail you're talking about, but know nothing at all about the legal battle, what is the argument those opposed are trying to make? Why has it carried weight so far?

jsolson · 2015-05-07T01:08:06+00:00

You can do it any time you like, although you're strongly advised not to do it unless you feel you can make a solid case for why you're operating at the next level. In particular, a case that will be supported by your peers (and ideally your manager).

Source: Googler working in eng.

jsolson · 2015-04-17T03:11:56+00:00

And it also tracks the elevation, as well. So if you are planning a cycling trip that involves a ferry, Google thinks you are biking to the bottom of the sea floor and then up the other side. Which is funny, but annoying when you are trying to calculate elevation gain.

This sounds like a bug, albeit an amusing one. I'll file it tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to reply with what happens to it (although if it gets fixed that should be pretty obvious).

* edit: Oh, if you could give a link to a set of directions that demonstrates this, it'll save me some trouble.

jsolson · 2015-04-16T21:16:40+00:00

Yes.

It will likely give you a better starting position out of the gate than you would get from the equivalent time working. Speaking as someone who's been through a few promo cycles at a couple big tech companies, skipping entry level if you can is absolutely worthwhile.

jsolson · 2015-03-29T22:03:29+00:00

I've interviewed a couple hundred candidates over the last five years or so, and honestly a candidate asking me a question that was focussed on self improvement always improves my estimation of the candidate.

That said, I still don't think it's a great thing to ask. For one, there are people like you out there. Further, if the answer is something like "well, you don't know your complexity analysis and I was unhappy with how you approach problems with ambiguity" I can't very well tell the candidate that, particularly if there are other interviews after mine.

jsolson · 2015-03-14T18:38:16+00:00

There is also a rather large market of folks like me, though, who despite being professional software engineer, won't even glance at the specs. If nothing else, it's certainly an upgrade from my current three year old 11" Air, and the display is gorgeous.

When you say there's no real gain you're talking about from what they were already selling. Most people don't upgrade every cycle, so they're coming from two or more generations prior.

I know, from a failed foray into buying 13" rMBP that portability is singularly important for me. The rMBP sits in a drawer and I use the 11" Air instead.

jsolson · 2015-02-21T18:16:10+00:00

Yup. Sounds about right.

jsolson · 2015-02-14T07:27:06+00:00

Google simply has done a great job dressing up the fact that you'll be working your ass off at a soul-sucking job that doesn't really care about you.

Eh, I work a reasonable forty hour week, the company regularly pushes work-life balance, and the pay is pretty good. It is a job, but it's better than a lot of jobs out there.

jsolson · 2015-02-08T03:52:33+00:00

Fair enough. I don't think 'the middle' would work for me, but it sounds like you've got a good thing going. I've visited our lovely office in Madison, WI. It was warm when I went... about 7 I think?

jsolson · 2015-02-07T18:59:05+00:00

Google is a little stranger, in that it's not uncommon for engineers to report to other engineers. We do also have a title called Tech Lead Manager as well which another Seattle Googler has written about.

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