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Comment by dajohnson89 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users.

You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a recruiting ad" then you should probably rethink. I never thought I'd say this, but the negativity here really indicates the kind of latent discrimination that so many URMs & women in tech complain about. I have literally no other explanation for it -- a senior engineer at Google could have implemented this compression and it would still be HN worthy, and nobody would be calling the blog article a fluffy PR piece.

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> a senior engineer at Google could have implemented this compression and it would still be HN worthy,

No, I doubt it would be. How many of the hundreds of little features in the google play store have been posted on HN with an article about the person who implemented them?

Also, I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to assume that any scoffing is due to sexism. I see the exact same cynicism and lack of awe in the posts below that I have come to expect from HN - regardless of gender or color of the person involved.

1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store.

Agreed on the high level of cynicism here -- we've also come to expect that. Moreover I never come to HN (my account is five years old) to point out sexism/racism -- it's just too sensitive and difficult of a subject and to be honest I'd rather just read/talk about topical things without getting political. But again, what I pointed out is stark and I have no other explanation for it (believe me, I want one).

Let me point out the title of the blog: "Google Student Blog: Google news and updates especially for students". Of course there is PR going on, and of course the achievements of an intern will often be on a smaller scale. But this particular achievement is high-impact and the intern deserves credit on that blog for her work. If you're not impressed, then just move on.

>> But this particular achievement is high-impact and the intern deserves credit on that blog for her work

I think the issue is that the project here was a library swap, which isn't hard to do. It just so happens to be at Google, where small optimizations reap huge rewards. Google want's to market it as "hey, look at the huge impact our interns have" and make it sound like a big deal, when in reality it's not that much of a crazy technical achievement.

>> 1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store.

I know a lot of interns at smaller companies who did very impressive work, but because the companies are smaller the numbers aren't as crazy (both women and men, I should add). The effort by them might very much be HN worthy, but you won't see it here because they don't have a huge PR machine behind them.

Kudos to Anamaria for the great work though! Will probably save Google some cash.

> 1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy?

Well it is, but the merit should come first to the engineers who implemented the Brotli algorithm. What Anamaria did was just to include the code for that algorithm in the Play Store. Sure, it's some good work, especially for an intern, but I think it's a big exaggeration to say that it is that work that saved 1.5 petabytes/day.

Deploying this at global scale was more than just changing some config and walking away. I'm sure things went wrong, changes had to be rolled back, lessons were learned. "just include the code", seriously, do you even deploy apps at scale?

You are perfectly right, and no, I haven't deployed anythong at the scale of Google. On the other hand, deployments at that scale are routinely done at Google, Facebook and Amazon amongst other tech giants, so an intern doing it shouldn't warrant an article.

> I have no other explanation for it (believe me, I want one)

Um, the fact that that her work saved that much bandwidth is a happy accident of the fact that she was at Google and assigned on a project that had a high user volume. Other than passing the intern interview loop, that took no absolutely no merit or effort on her part whatsoever.

Moreover, the blog post describes the work as "to add support for Brotli for both new app installs and app update." I mean, hundreds of thousands of developers use third-party libraries to add functionality every single day of the year. Some "achievement".

Please take off the X-ism colored glasses, dajohnson89. I promise that it makes the world look like a better place.

It's of course true that at Google you have a chance to make a bigger impact. (Not guaranteed - it depends on what project the intern is given, and that's kind of random.) And interns do get lots of support.

But, to say that there is "no merit or effort on her part" is an insult to all the good work interns do while they're here. They're not coasting.

Seems like you're so eager to tear this down that you'll say anything.

Given the fact that your first paragraph says the same thing my first paragraph does, it's unclear to me what point you're trying to make.

The intern in question had no part in making Google the size it is and was most likely not offered much choice in the way of team or project assigned, so no merit or effort was involved in either of the two. Which part would you like to dispute?

I dispute the part where you say she shouldn't get any credit for her work because she did the work at Google.

If you're going to make that argument, nobody at Google deserves any credit for anything we do. That's not how we normally measure impact. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, but putting those resources to work effectively still counts.

I agree with you.

To be fair, 10% is the better number attributed to this change.

That ten percent amounts to 1.5 petabytes is a credit to the Google Play Store / Android platform.

The throughput isn't really that important. 10 GB of savings per day where the intern actually implemented the algorithm would be more newsworthy.

I think you're asking the wrong hypothetical: if this were another Google intern who was male, would the article even be discussed here? I think if people weren't impressed they'd ignore it (as they do so many other blog posts), not criticize it. The decision to debunk versus ignore is not applied evenly.

I agree, even if all she did was comment out one line of config and enable another line, doing it at scale, in production, is not to be done lightly. I suspect as a student intern she learned a lot about doing that and contributed a fair amount to making sure it was done carefully and correctly. I'm jealous actually and I change config lines like that every day.

In fact, this was not posted to the main Google blog, but rather a special "student" blog that's obviously designed for recruiting interns. Had I seen this post when I was going to school, I certainly would have seriously considered a Google internship.

So bravo, Anamaria, for completing important work for Google, and bravo, Google, for highlighting her work in an appropriate place. Not every good work needs to be earth shattering.

Even if this is a recruiting post... let's stick to the facts: Her work has nevertheless saved 1.5 PB per day. All of the people who are saying that everybody can do this and implement this: I bet your hacker excellent skills cannot save 1.5 PB traffic per day. And it's nice to see that an interns work can have so great results. Kudos to Google that they have great programs for young people. And I'm also forever thankful to them that I had the opportunity to work as Google Summer of Code Student and Mentor for them which was a true life changer for me!

Most people don't work at companies that have 1.5 PB of traffic per day. The question to ask is if another intern in the same position would be able to accomplish what she did of integrating a library into an application.

Well, HN is where rather technical discussions take place.

And from a technological viewpoint, some people here may find that swapping gzip/etc for brotli is not that astonishing. After all, she didn't invent or implement Brotli, but merely applied it.

Note, this is not to denigrate her work in any way - the results, scaled at Google's level, are very impressive.

It is sad to see this turn into a gender-focused discussion, as I'm sure we'd see all the same "meh" comments here regardless of intern's gender or any other physical traits.

Also, I've noticed this trend where the top comment is attacking over-exaggerated "astounding negativity". There's skepticism here under nearly every article, and the odd couple of dead, downvoted comments; not "astounding negativity" by any means. While it's challenging to resist the desire to virtue signal and collect karma points, please don't exaggerate.

> the negativity here really indicates the kind of latent discrimination that so many URMs & women in tech complain about

was with you until this. hn's negativity is across the board, it's very unlikely there's discrimination going on here imo

I agree with you.

It is things like this one which makes a great engineer. Not only to spend decades coding an earth-shattering algorithm that will take the industry by storm, but also knowing how to save 1.5PB per day with a rather simple (I guess it's not as simple) decision.

HN is supposedly full of business-minded technologists. How are we missing the great impact this had on the business is mind-boggling.

I can't find an explanation for this reaction either.

"has real impact for millions of users"

Come on. That is so not hip these days. She saved a bunch of PB ? who cares. If only she built a nice shiny js app, now that is something to talk about

If my impression was anything to go by, I clicked on the original title of "Intern saves Google 15M GB every day" (something like that) expecting to hear what on earth could have saved that much bandwidth. Instead, I got an advertisement for how great this woman is. (But, now that you want to hire her, too bad, she's already taken.) There was just one sentence that talked about what I went there for: namely, she changed the compression algorithm. If the title were "Look how awesome this Google intern is" I wouldn't have had a problem with it. On the other hand, I woudn't have clicked it, either.

This is surely a great resume item for her, it's a direct benefit to the place she interned, which is pretty awesome. But I think people are quite well attuned to Google's marketing/recruiting efforts these days, and how they compare to the average example. (It's like when such-and-such for profit school brags about how it's graduates work for companies A, B, and C, but more than likely, that's a very small percentage, and the results for the average graduate are lower.)

So yeah, it's awesome she did this, but most interns should not expect this out of their Google internship.

I wouldn't call this discrimination - I don't think HN has ever treated early-career projects with a light touch. There's a curmudgeonly atmosphere in nearly all of these threads!

On the contrary, I have seen projects that change desktop wallpapers get LOTS of praise

URMs?

Underrepresented minorities

This is typical HN; a bunch of people who think highly of themselves for not being sheep working for the big companies, and for whom everything that these companies do is easy peasy stuff that they could do in their sleep.

If I had done something to save anybody 1.5 Petabytes of bandwidth per day, I would be very content for at least a few months. Congratulations to the intern for having such a lasting impact.

> This is typical HN; a bunch of people who think highly of themselves for not being sheep working for the big companies, and for whom everything that these companies do is easy peasy stuff that they could do in their sleep.

Please don't mar your fine comment with an uncharitable dismissal of your own, and please don't make up generalizations about HN to score rhetorical points. The problem of dismissiveness and snark on the internet is a systemic one that is far from limited to HN. Many more people here are charitable and good-natured than not.

+1 I am proud and jealous of her. She did something amazing during her internship that I haven't done in my 10 year professional career. Hell she very well might win a Turing. I would happily have her as my mentor.

+1 This article a great of example of women in tech doing real-world, impactful, "proper" engineering work that directly benefits millions of users.

We need more stories like this.

Please - if you criticised this article about how an engineer implemented a newly-published compression algorithm that saved 1.5 petabytes day, please go take 2 minutes to think genuinely about why you criticised this article. Your 120 seconds of introspection will benefit our entire industry regardless of your motivations and conclusions.

You mean because it's vacuous and condescending? By pretending this is a noteworthy accomplishment, this article de-legitimizes the actual accomplishments of all women in tech. To put this forward as something worth writing about is to essentially say "we don't have any real positive stories of women in technical positions at our company, so here's a library swap that we can use Google's massive traffic numbers to make seem cool".

I'm sure this woman is a perfectly competent engineer and will go on to do things that are actually super cool in her life. And she likely already has, if she's got an internship at Google. This just isn't one of them, we all know it, and so do the authors of this article.

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