Sergey Brin Resume (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin Resume (1996)

infolab.stanford.edu

109 pointshitr50 comments

Contra all the chuckleheads making jokes about him never getting hired anywhere today, this is actually an extremely impressive resume for a third-year graduate student. He had a sole-author publication in a top conference already!

I wonder how the resume of Jobs, Zuckeberg and Gates would look like... But does it matter? You don't need a resume to start your own company last time I checked.

A professor once told me "It's common to see 'A' grad students working for 'C' or 'D' grade students.", I think what he meant was that 'A' grade students would never take the risk of starting their own business against odds, while 'C' or 'D' students sometimes do not have that many choices, so it's easier for them to take the not-very-calculated risk.

Then again, all these guys were above average smart for sure and ahead of the time.

But then again the C and D grade students are backed by wealthy parents who can afford them slacking off. This is not to undermine any of them but, when you have a fairly soft bed to fall on when things take a wrong turn, you are more willing to take risks.

Most A grade students don't usually have the same wealthy parents to turn to for their whims and they have to struggle.

Maybe C and D have other interests than just studying? Maybe they will get something out of that traded time that the A won't, which will give them an actual edge in the real world, non academic world.

Your statement is flawed and an awful generalization. Are you frustrated some of your C and D friends are more successful than you?

Well I being just graduated from university also believe this is very accurate. I did medicine as my degree and one thing I noticed is that almost all A grade students know only medicine and at times lacks the even the basic common knowledge. Some don't have any relationships and a messed social life.

I'm a C grade student did medicine read HN, I'm good at coding, I hack and love making things, have a good social life.

And even my other C grade students play games, go out have a very good time/life.

But there are times I feel whether I should have given up my CS skills for medicine because they don't go well together.

I was an A student myself, but I know a lot of extremely bright and successful C/D students. They did poorly in university because maturity / didn't particularly care for the theoretical nature of the material.

Holy generalizations Batman!

Edit: This meme may be dated, context: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Holy%20X%2C%2...!

Of course not; I never said it did matter.

Hypothetically, if Google never happened and I was a lead dev looking across the table at Sergey Brin deciding whether to hire him with that resume, I'm saying I absolutely would. Any hiring manager or lead dev today would make the same decision, is my point.

I would hire him.

BS in mathematics and computer science. He has a solid foundation. He graduated with honors in both too. Great.

Parallel algorithms, 3D routines, C on a machine with 16384 processors in 1990. Many people didn't even know multiple processors where a thing back then.

Portable C++ library in 1992. C++, plus thinking of portability. This was a big deal back then, a lot of people where not even on the C++ train then, mostly C. The C++ might have given me a pause. :D

Developed scheduling algorithms. Scheduling is hard. Developing hard algorithms is good, we have a problem solver.

Latex to HTML converter. Translating from one language to another is pretty much compiling.

This page is a blast from the past as well: http://i.stanford.edu/db_pages/members.html

My favorite website of the 90's has to be this one though: http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html

hmm looks familiar ... http://infolab.stanford.edu/~hector/photos/1994/DBGJun94V2/0...

Being born in Aug 1973, he started university at 16 and did the Mathematica code analysis and extraction tool at 19. I expected to see an extreme prodigy but that's still a fast start and he only got faster.

Check out the page source

The commented out content is the best part -

A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.

He got his wish, just not the very little work part unfortunately.

I'd say he got 3 out of 4, I'd agree on those terms :)

Damn I'm not seeing any Java experience how on earth does he expect to get a job? And how did he find work at all those companies without them thinking he was just going to work there for a bit before he was stolen from them by Google? Guess I'll go back down to begging Subway for a job.

Frightening how little I have achieved in the same time frame, despite trying.

“His friends were surprised, and asked him the reason of it. ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?’” - Caesar

Then again, most of will probably under perform for the next 20 years too.

To be fair Alexander did have Aristotle as his mentor.

There's no denying he was a very intelligent individual even before google :)

"I worked on a project with Hector Garcia-Molina involving automated detection of copyright violations. Together with James Davis (another Ph.D. student here), we developed COPS , the COpyright Protection System." Sergey Brin.- http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/copy.html

He did a lot of work on data mining, web indexing and other web related works. It is interesting.

And still, the "automated detection of copyright violations" used by youtube works like crap and is used by criminals to strong arm real content creators to give them a cut of they profits.

Apparently this is Larry Page's Stanford page http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/

I'll admit it, I most likely wouldn't have called to interview him... he never had a job before (at least none on his resume). Admittedly, I'm not trying to change the world. I'm just trying to do better than my competition for my customers. I don't need an academic on the payroll. I'm glad that resume didn't come across my desk. I wouldn't have know what to do with him and would certainly wold be kicking myself now.

I think you missed the entire Work Experience section at the bottom.

Hey... movie ratings! Pre-netflix.

Uhh if you think about it, it's probably just a (maybe weighted) dot product of binary vectors, sorted, and then a set diff.

Yea, I feel like this is one of those classic easy projects that everyone thinks of at some point early on in their programming life. That was my "learn python" project too (almost 15 years later...). I just used Rotten Tomatoes metrics and similarity with critics.

Sorry Sergey, you'll never make it past the automated HR filter with that.

...seriously? He was a Stanford PhD student. I doubt they have any trouble.

Yeah, but he doesnt have 15 years experience with react.

This is a meme that I've never understood. This isn't a problem for Stanford PhDs, or hell Stanford undergrads.

Guess that interest in data mining paid off...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

It's surprising that emails were few enough then that a student might get a firstname@domain email.

In fairness, "Sergey" strikes me as a rather uncommon first name. Still, what a time indeed!

Because it's Russian?

Well...

there are 6 Sergeys listed on Stanford People Search, and 100+ Johns, Brians, etc.

https://stanfordwho.stanford.edu/SWApp/Search.do

I enrolled in 2011 at a large German university and I was able to register (first letter of my given name)@(university).de. Apparently, very few people tried their initials before.

Movie Ratings TO Page Rank

Is there a mirror of the movie rating website?

A PhD in two years?

Most likely, he joined the Ph.D program and got a Masters along the way.

Yeah, if you have a masters it's possible.

Who gets a PhD without also getting a master's? Isn't the ordinary schedule two years for the master's, five more for the PhD?

In every university I've seen (in France and Japan in STEM) the Ph.D. is minimum 3 years, but many (most?) students do it in 4 because they don't have the required publications in 3 years. It's rare, but some do it in 5.

Apparently in liberal arts the Ph.D. tends to drag on an on 5, 6, 7 years...

So yes, you do need a master before starting your Ph.D., and I've never heard of someone doing their Ph.D. in 2 years. Maybe if you hit a homerun and get prestigious publications very early.

My wife got a PhD in neuro without a masters. It was part of an MD/PhD program. The PhD itself took a bit under 3 years in the middle of med school. Given 7 years of residency and another year of fellowship, she can expect her first job at 38, which is coincidentally the age I always figured I would retire at.

Mind blown.

Wow, this page loads fast. I bet he's using Google AMP.

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