Nothing Official About It

Its been sometime since the last post. In the meanwhile I have been looking around to figure out Google’s blogging policy. As suspected it can be summarized as “Write about your cat, dog and holiday in Osaka but please don’t bother even mentioning the name of your project or the technology you work on”. Its kind of irritating – especially for someone coming from a company where your CEO publicly blogs the intricate details of suing the competition’s ass off. But, atleast my stock options are not completely worthless !

After my first month (almost) at Google, I can only say – W O W !

The efficiency with which work gets done is incredible. The processes, people, tools, attitude and culture are unlike anything I’ve experienced before. And the scale at which problems are solved is overwhelming. We are always talking about thousands of machines, millions of users, billions of documents,  trillions of graph edges, milli seconds of HTTP response times and microseconds of latency.

The amount of stuff you have to learn to be productive almost kills you because everything is built in-house. The world knows about MapReduce and GFS and BigTable and ProtocolBuffers. But there are hundreds of more specialized gadgets inside wonderland which I cannot talk about !

The quality of people you get to work with is astonishing. Everybody seems to be over-qualified for the job they are supposedly doing. And they usually end up doing “cooler” stuff than what their job roles demand. Most Nooglers I’ve talked to, have this idea of being born with a Silver Spoon stuck in an orifice in the southern end of their anatomies – “I am special”. Like hell you are, and so is everyone else in this building.

The resume of my teammate says in its closing line:

“Interviewed by Keanu Reaves and Laurence Fishburne for profiling the character of Neo in The Matrix”

Shit ! And I thought I was a Geek ….

Filed under: General