What a lovely profile. I worked at Google early enough that I got to know Jeff and Sanjay, although never worked directly with them (to my regret). Every aspect of this article rings true to me, the way they are, the way they work together. I always admired how incredibly collaborative they were. They never competed with each other. Or really with anyone else, either, they just quietly did excellent work and helped others do their work too.
I'm so glad this this article (unlike so many other representations of Jeff and Sanjay's work) does not overlook Sanjay's contributions.<p>I don't know what it is; maybe Sanjay is a weird (read: non-English) name, maybe it's that computing culture's obsession with lone hackers leaves no room for a partnership like Jeff and Sanjay's. Anyway, kudos to the New Yorker for not falling into that trap.
I was so delighted by this piece and then I got to the byline - James Somers strikes again!<p>You might know his writing from “You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary” or his amazing article about New York’s subway system told through the lens of the countdown clock: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-dont-we-know-where-all-the-trains-are/415152/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...</a><p>Highly recommend all his work:
<a href="http://jsomers.net/" rel="nofollow">http://jsomers.net/</a>
> Most of the fragile insights that laid the foundation of a new vision emerged not when the whole group was together, and not when members worked alone, but when they collaborated and responded to one another in pairs<p>The article gives several examples of this dynamic, but one that came to mind for me was how Monty Python members created sketches for <i>Flying Circus</i>:<p>> Writing started at 9 am and finished at 5 pm. Typically, Cleese and Chapman worked as one pair isolated from the others, as did Jones and Palin, while Idle wrote alone. After a few days, they would join together with Gilliam, critique their scripts, and exchange ideas. Their approach to writing was democratic. If the majority found an idea humorous, it was included in the show.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python</a>
Interesting tidbits:<p><i>To solve problems at scale, paradoxically, you have to know the smallest details</i> -Alan Eustace<p><i>Today, Google’s engineers exist in a Great Chain of Being that begins at Level 1. At the bottom are the I.T. support staff. Level 2s are fresh out of college; Level 3s often have master’s degrees. Getting to Level 4 takes several years, or a Ph.D. Most progression stops at Level 5. Level 6 engineers—the top ten per cent—are so capable that they could be said to be the reason a project succeeds; Level 7s are Level 6s with a long track record. Principal Engineers, the Level 8s, are associated with a major product or piece of infrastructure. Distinguished Engineers, the Level 9s, are spoken of with reverence. To become a Google Fellow, a Level 10, is to win an honor that will follow you for life. Google Fellows are usually the world’s leading experts in their fields. Jeff and Sanjay are Google Senior Fellows—the company’s first and only Level 11s.</i>
If you want to see an example of Sanjay's elegant code, take a look at his Go stream package: <a href="https://github.com/ghemawat/stream" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ghemawat/stream</a>
Good stuff. Every sport has great partnerships (Jordon - Pippen, Brady - Gronk) and I always wondered if such a thing would even be possible in SE as I've felt overly self conscious and inefficient while pair programming.<p>Though what really makes this my favorite long read of the year is how it follows their story over the course of Google's rise and the subtle juxtapositions between early Google of "doors across sawhorses" and today with "Level 0-11". Given all the recent news with engineer walkouts and protests it makes you realize that Google have probably done the best job of handling the scaling challenges of being a unicorn and making the necessary cultural adjustments as they grew in size.
After reading this article, I'm surprised that Google doesn't encourage pair programming / developing developer relationships at the level that Jeff and Sanjay have here. One might even argue that the manner in which interviewing and hiring is currently done in the tech industry in general might actively work against building the sorts of relationships where the output is greater than the sum of the inputs.<p>Edit: added a missing "the".
Holy moly, a mention of Bogdan! He was a legend of his own. Some of the most consequential changes, like elevating your service to higher QoS levels, which something like e.g. Gmail would require, were gated on his approval and his only. Someone made him a SW Easter egg, but the story already on the Internet gets some basic facts wrong.
Does anyone have a reference for "In 1966, researchers at the System Development Corporation discovered that the best programmers were more than ten times as effective as the worst." ?<p>I'm seeing the year 1968 at
<a href="http://thecomputerboys.com/?tag=black-art#fn-156-1" rel="nofollow">http://thecomputerboys.com/?tag=black-art#fn-156-1</a><p>Is there a 1966 reference out there somewhere? Or perhaps the actual study was done in '66 and didn't make it into press until '68? I didn't pull the original paper.<p>(The fact checkers at the New Yorker are typically very sharp.)<p>edit: I pulled the original paper (10.1145/362851.362858). The studies were done in 1966!<p>Interesting to see the genesis of the myth of the 10x programmer.
This is a wonderfully told story of two very senior engineers who developed a lifelong friendship and wrote some of the core of the Google search engine I use countless times per day - I really enjoyed this piece.
Wow, this article is pretty amazing to me. I have a joke (err, kind of a joke) that I like to say, "It's never a cosmic ray." What I mean by that is that when you are debugging and getting incredibly frustrated, right when you feel that you want to give up because you can't find the bug, that you shouldn't blame "cosmic rays" because 99.999% of the time it's a logic problem.<p>Here was a case where <i>it actually was cosmic rays</i> (at least, not a logic problem), and these guys found it. I also agree with the title and intro of the article - I think it's very possible that if these 2 exact people hadn't been at Google at the time than Google's path could have been very different. Makes me also appreciate how much luck is involved in any successful indeavor. Not luck that they found the bug (that was hard work), but luck that these 2 guys found themselves working at Google right when Google needed them.
“In terms of sexiness, compilers are pretty much as boring as it gets,”<p>That bit surprised me. For me it doesn't get much sexier than compilers.
“I don’t know why more people don’t do it,” Sanjay said, of programming with a partner.<p>=======<p>Maybe because most employers won't pay for that. Two people? For one level of output? You'd have to prove yourself a level 11 googler before most places would give you the luxury of working as a long-term pair.
> The world’s most robust computer systems... used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips. But Google... bought cheaper computers that lacked that feature.<p>> Together, Jeff and Sanjay wrote code to compensate for the offending machines.<p>I'm guessing the article is referring to Google buying servers with non-ECC RAM.<p>How do you write code to compensate for non-ECC RAM?
these are the kind of articles i like reading, well written, interesting subject and good content length. Too many times i read bold headlines on HN, "Why X is bringing america down", then go to read it and just when they get to the crux of the matter i find the article has ended smh.
> On Sanjay’s monitor, a thick column of 1s and 0s appeared, each row representing an indexed word. Sanjay pointed: a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1.<p>I was curious how he can see "a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1" in a "thick column of 1s and 0s"? Can you give a specific example. I'm not questioning that he did but I'd like to know a specific example.
Was surprised to hear the audio version of the story has a different title - "Binary stars". I think the editorial board went with a more click friendly title.
Anyone know where folks like Peter Norvig and Urs Hölzle fit on the L1-L11 scale? I assumed that all of the early employees/now legends were at the top level, so I was surprised to see the article state otherwise.
There was an earlier thread in HN on them here - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353</a>
It is such a beautiful story of friendship. Even married couple don’t this level of match in mind. Only a few a luckily like that. Their partnership has resulted monumental contributions.
Serious question - is this an ad? For the company, showing they have a solution to new growth problems which will keep them a growth company?
(custom chip, architected for AI)<p>And how they solved the problem before with this team?