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>> 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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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.