An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google
bradfitz.com
bradfitz.com
I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled door hack in a college dorm. His roommate posted and basically said, "this guy is brilliant, it's just the tip of the iceberg - he posts what he's working on at bradfitz.com, check it out." This was in...1998? 1999?
Seeing him start to post a daily journal, get frustrated, then write LiveJournal was fascinating. Posts on the problems he faced scaling it, open discussions on caching architecture (leading to a LiveJournal user suggesting he investigate slab allocation technique that led to memcached), identity (leading to OpenID), moderation, etc. were always illuminating. Moving to Go because he understood what problems needed solving just made sense. Rewriting Google's downloader because it sucked? Well, of course he would.
I don't know Brad other than occasional comments/responses from the early livejournal days (user number ~10K, after procrastinating actually joining for too long), but it's clear that he draws inspiration from overcoming roadblocks.
Taken in that context, leaving Google is completely understandable - having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.
Good for him that he recognized this and is taking the leap into the unknown. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next, but I'm guessing the real treasures will be found in the process and not the final outcome.
I love prototyping but hate the instant terrible feedback. People often look at the construction instead of the results and/or can't/won't imagine it a first step or how awesome a final product it can turn into.
Don't even look at the comments. Turn them off if you can. They're not paying you, so you are under no obligation to please them.
On the other hand, if you know that you're going to get undesired feedback, why post your stuff in public in the first place? You don't get the glory without the risk. Before the internet, people did things because they liked to, and because they enjoyed them. They didn't need the praise of a thousand random strangers to feel good about their accomplishments.
While you may argue "deal with it", and rightly so in most circumstances, but then you are only addressing an issue of grit. I have plenty of grit in _some_ areas of my life, but not _all_ areas of my life.
And, sometimes the negativity is unexpected like when you are just showing something you find cool or neat that you built. (ie, I have never once put my code out in public nor sought praise for it)
Everyone has a limit where they can't take any more negative feedback on something.
And with prototyping I have found it better to wait to show the client until it's in an "appealing" state. Hence my question about masking tape prototype. (my favorite material to build with as a kid because it was plentiful and easy to rip, but was unappealing visually)
The masking tape criticism would come into category 2.
Your categories are all logical responses, what about the immediate emotional effects of the responses?
If you have never experienced an immediate emotional response from criticism I count you extremely lucky that you don't have to face it. But for those of us that do, we are looking for answer to the emotional side of things.
Is there some technique you have used to blunt the emotions and look at them only logically?
Our brain/body is good at adapting so you simply ignore it or rather embrace the pain, yes it will be painful in the beginning but the more you are exposed to it the better it will be over time.
I don't disagree with you, I was just hoping there may be something else to consider.
You are right, there may be a way, I am hoping there maybe something to consider...
My reaction was, huh cool. I didn't even stop to think about the aesthetics. You were the one to introduce that into this thread.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/976f8050-5fc9-4cbc-abf3-16cfaa4...
I don't think anyone would say that Google is too cushy and roadblock free when it comes to getting things done. Mo' money, mo' problems.
> I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.)
It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.
For anyone reading this: if you ever find yourself placed in a "PIP", leave. That's like being inside a black hole's event horizon, you'll never come back.
That said, I have seen people come back from a PIP and kill it, to the point where on their next review they get all of the equity they lost in the prior cycle plus the comp from the new cycle. Obviously this is rare, but I have seen it.
If you have an hostile manager or HR department then yes it's time to move on.
I find movement to be distracting as well (esp. if I'm sitting next to a high-traffic aisle as I was in one short-lived position). However, what's even worse for me is when several different conversations all start up at the same time, in the same space. Americans are already extremely loud talkers, but then stick a bunch of them together in one room, having 2-5 different conversations simultaneously, and I truly don't understand how anyone can take it, or even understand whichever conversation they're part of.
Sometimes you have to vote with your feet.
Sure they save 10% on real estate due to absences, but I wonder if it's to sell a cool look. GM just changed to open floor plan.
https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/...
It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well being.
I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month
My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.
Plus it's harder to get away with blatantly goofing off if anyone can look over and see your screen at any time, but I dunno how big a deal that is when people are setting their own hours and picking the projects they're working on. At least in my case, I don't give a crap if my teammates have Facebook and Netflix onscreen at all times so long as they're getting their jobs done
In that context, companies' consideration of expenditures will take into account capital versus operational categories.
If you’ve ever heard someone talking about “the color of money” in a business context in regards to different types of incoming and outgoing accounts, this is what they’re talking about.
Whether capex is better or worse than opex from any particular vantage point is so heavily context dependent that I’m unsuited to provide a general overview, but it is easy to see how it could matter when you compare expenses attributable to salary vs expenses attributable to the purchase of real property in much the same way it matters to you as an individual whether you used your finances to buy a house or pay someone to mow your lawn.
Have you ever tracked your time as a salaried software developer? I used to, and used to think it was a stupid exercise. Then I learned that my payroll costs were being capitalized against the project in development. Two years later when the project launched, it hit the books and started deprecating over seven years. That meant my company essentially had two years where my salary wasn’t on their books; when it hit, those two years were skewed over seven.
Have you ever had to differentiate between tracking time spent doing development and time doing support? Support is an ongoing operational expense that can’t be capitalized.
Same pot of money, vastly different ways to split it up.
Would it make you feel better to consider that those dollars aren't really coming from their bank account in any meaningful sense? They're almost always from a large creditor who extended a line of credit, or from the sale of unsecured debt against the company if you're big and bad enough. And that their "bank account" is almost entirely divorced from cash on hand, and it's built up from money other businesses and customers owe them for services?
We assume that businesses are going to be in business for the foreseeable future, that they'll pay their debts and collect profit on their assets and the world keeps moving. In that sense, corporate accounting isn't the smoke and mirrors; it's the way we give that assumption some basis in reality. We assume that your business will stay in operation and sell the product you helped build, so why penalize them for not being able to get money before the asset is built?
Organizations aren't rational; they're a product of their structure and incentives.
At any point in time, you can count on one chatty person to either not engage, or to disengage once they have.
Then everyone brings headphones and it's harder to ask people questions than being in cubicles.
Yes, and in addition, sociable developers value being able to collaborate more easily in open space. I don't know what your coworkers are like or what age range they are, but over my career, I've absolutely seen that engineers in their 20s absolutely prefer open spaces, and are extremely sociable. I haven't seen this so much with older generations. The type of people entering this profession has really changed over the decades.
Developers are close to a representative sample of the whole population, and the general populace is not introverted :-)
And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done.
This isn't quite right: before having your desktop computer in your dorm room was normal, you had to go to a computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever. Computer labs with PCs were quite common until colleges started requiring students to buy their own PCs, and before this, the computer labs had terminals (like VT100) which connected to VAX servers or mainframes.
Anyone who went to college up until the mid-1990s should be familiar with computer labs.
My computer lab in college had a lab monitor who enforced the "library quiet" culture. It was nice.
Virtually every university library has quiet areas and collaborative areas now. Most of my peers go to the library to concentrate (work in solitude) and visit the loud area of the library when they want to be more social or meet in groups. Also it's not like people are constantly talking in the loud area either, most people are by themselves focusing on work but will be interrupted by friends occasionally whereas in the quiet area interruptions don't happen at all. You sometimes end up texting your friend next to you because you don't wanna disturb others.
There was a post a few months ago on HN saying that librarians are rethinking how libraries should be structured because people are using them to go and focus rather than for books.
Your hot-desk point is true though, my peers at the office and at school are more accustomed to carrying around a laptop and setting up wherever rather than setting up a personal workspace with pictures of family and the sort.
Then, they should separately have buildings (or separate spaces within that building maybe, for existing structures) that are dedicated entirely to studying, with both quiet areas with cubicles (there were things like this at the library when I went to college), and more open areas where talking is acceptable. Then, the university can put a cafe there to sell overpriced coffee drinks and snacks, and the building should be very profitable.
I'm also thinking that you might not want lots of food and drink around the stacks of books. But in an open study area, why not?
Finally, if I go to the library to look at stacks of books, the last thing I want is for the bookcases to be surrounded by a somewhat noisy study area with groups of people talking. It should be as quiet as a tomb.
This is not my experience. Most of the upper management at my employer spend their days wandering the halls looking for open "huddle rooms". Or, they just camp out semi-permanently in one of those spaces. They absolutely do not collaborate in public. In fact, they can't - too much of what they do involves information that, if not strictly confidential, is at least somewhat need-to-know.
This is possibly the only place I've ever worked where they made even a half-assed attempt to maintain the ratio of employees to meeting spaces. And you're right. Post densification, managers are constantly having to schedule meeting hours or days later or settle for two smaller meetings because everything is full. And if you screw up the room reservation, you have to just cancel the meeting because there is nowhere to go.
But a lot of that pain trickles down onto the people doing the work, so I don't think it's fair to look at it as getting what they deserve. It sucks for them, it's debilitating for us, and we always have to make it up by cutting corners or working later.
I used to just go home when I couldn't find an available bathroom. Fuck that company
This is the opposite of my experience. One thing that shocked me about a move to an open plan office after a life with offices was how stifling to discussion.
It's so disruptive to have a conversation at someone's workspace, that to discuss anything nontrivial (or even slightly sensitive) all participants go somewhere else. This greater cost subtly means that people don't really discuss as much.
When people do, it's more often in formal meetings (though of course people can go find a whiteboard together for a chat here and there). These meetings tend to fill their timeslots whether they need to or not, a known problem with meetings.
Random, "What have you been working on" do not rise to the point of happening as often, since chitchat at someone's desk is disruptive. Obviously this still happens sometimes at people's desks, as well as in shared areas, between activities, etc., but it's decreased. A culture of more regular 1:1s tries to help make up for this, I think, but the formal nature of scheduled 1:1s makes it hard to have the same organic discussions.
Even fairly mid-level management (and certainly upper management) and the large open-plan office company I currently work for claims conference rooms 24/7. This is clearly not about the ability to concentrate, but about the increased ability to collaborate.
But one observation I have made is that open offices force me to bring work home. I can sometimes accomplish more coding in one night at home than in 1 week in an open office. One time I kept a log of every 6 mins at work and found that <40% of the time was actually spent coding in an open office vs 95% working at home and communicating over slack (I don‘t think I need to tell anyone here one 8 hour coding session is not equivalent to eight 1 hour sessions).
I think do not disturb private desks with open office hot desks or an open office with telecommuting is ideal.
Some people are much better at thinking on their feet and out loud (I'm one of them). Ideas are fragile, and if you're trying to verbalize, for the first time, why something bugs you or how you think you fix a problem, and there's a bunch of fast-talkers around you they're going to kill your idea before they even get a chance.
I used to meet with these people privately, sort out what really bugged them, poke at their idea and come up with a compromise they'd still accept, then I'd go into meetings and try to out-talk the other fast-talkers.
Now you get one shot a day to do that, maybe, if we're both going out to lunch, going together, and don't bring the wrong people along.
I've worried sometimes that my soft skills were a little lacking. But I'm finding over time that my soft skills were actually pretty great, they just needed doors.
Then reduces meetings. As Jeff Bezos says "communication is terrible"
Perhaps all that chit chat and meeting time is put to good use instead.
I'd be very surprised if that were the extent of the difference. Are these numbers based on any data, or guesses?
It works great for us and lets certain personalities control the level of interaction based on their tolerance. The sales guys love to chat naturally. For the employees who cross both sales/support + dev roles where we keep 1-2 "free" desks in the grouping which you can just pull your chair too.
Multi-person office rooms is really the ideal solution. For us we could scale it up as the company grows by building a 3rd wall creating 3 offices of equal size capped at 4-6 people each.
The hard part of course is scaling beyond that as almost every office property has been previously designed for with the open-concept in mind. Building your own walls or tearing down others isn't the easiest thing to do (or get approval for) in plenty of buildings, especially older ones. But as others have mentioned it's worth its weight in gold.
As cube size goes up, eventually there's enough space for three people in a two person cube, or two people in a one person cube. You want exactly enough space for someone to be able to bring a chair and comfortably look over your shoulder, and not one iota more.
It saves an average of 40 square feet (65 for open office, 100 for an individual office), plus a couple of thousand in construction costs.
So, at around $100 per square foot per year (figures vary wildly, but I saw a couple of concrete values in the $75 range for the bay area), plus a one time cost of $25 per square feet for construction, that's less than $5,000 a year per employee, plus an additional one-time $1,000 amortized over about 10 years.
(He may not have quit directly because of the open office plan, but given that it's one of the few complaints he makes, it obviously is a factor.)
It's not though. It's merely a qualification to the "Google is comfortable" comment. He says clearly the reason he's leaving is he's a bit bored. And that he doesn't want to be stuck in a comfortable rut. How would making him more comfortable with a private office address those issues?
To make a parallel with Microsoft in the early 00's and IBM before that:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of the Redmond company’s demise are, to say the least, premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.
Google has more money than Microsoft had back then and Google's product-market fit has been amazing since day 1. Any 1 individual (or even 100 individuals, 1000 individuals) could mess up royally and Google would still be around in 2050 :-)
In an imagined hyper-accelerated future market where the trend continues, companies will be born, grow large, be disrupted and die in a figurative eyeblink. And Google's lifespan would be cut considerably shorter in such a circumstance, if for example something like Brave's business model were to hockey-stick and disrupt their golden goose.
However, the counterfactual to that is that there surely is some kind of end to accelerating turnover in the markets. And it's a statistical rule; individual companies can be hardy survivors given the right circumstances and management, and companies with longstanding platform monopolies, like IBM, MS, Oracle, and now Google tend to have a lot more freedom to redefine themselves; it's the customers that get screwed, not the company. All the company has to do is find a way to move its customers to the next-gen platform, and even when they start failing at that, like IBM, they have a lengthy fall.
Yeah totally data driven.
Many companies spend huge, huge sums of money on open plan offices. Like, not just renting them but tricking them out with super expensive desk units, fountains, game areas, etc. They even pay money to tear down privacy features and replace them with functionless decorations like exposed ductwork or glass whiteboard walls, even when they have no plan at all to increase worker density.
In a world where SV is paying a third of a million dollars to developers, are you really saving money? As a fraction of the cost of your developers this is tiny.
Maybe developers should start Bringing Your Own Cubicle...
When the monetary and other incentives change.
Open plan offices are currently the cheapest way to cram bodies into office space, and the loss in productivity, quality of life, privacy and sanity doesn't factor into the facilities cost equation, which considers facility capital and operational expenses and ignores everything else.
As others have noted, the executives who make decisions also enjoy easy surveillance, which is facilitated by open plan offices.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...
At some point in 2013, I was a Linux sysadmin with 20 years of work under my belt and rapidly burning out, seeing the DevOps movement approach and feeling outmoded. I couldn't code. I saw a post here on HN about Brad's rewriting of Google's download system in Go and was intrigued. That night, almost out of a job and feeling like I had nothing left to lose, I sat down and started to learn Go. Hoping to write a control system for a high altitude balloon, I started writing a little every night after work. Soon, I attended The first Gophercon and really fell in love.
From there, doors started opening for me. I left the sysadmin job and got a job as a DevOps engineer. Wrote more and more Go. Better jobs and better pay followed. Job interviews became something to look forward to, not fear.
Anyway, it was Brad's blog entry that inspired me and totally changed my life. Things are amazing today. Thanks, Brad.
Edit: this looks like one of the versions of that slide deck - http://www.danga.com/words/2004_lisa/lisa04.pdf
And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking about https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/ , which has only grown more hilarious to me over time.
from his update:
"When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I learned Google's internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages, Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is very popular, stable and, while there's a lot to do, things--often necessarily--move pretty slowly. Moving slowly is fine, and hyper-specializing in small corners of Go makes sense at scale (few percent improvements add up!), but I want to build something new again.
I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.) What next?
TBA. But building something new."
If i may be so bold as to suggest areas where you might want to peek at for your future attention...
* Maybe, work on the Dendrite effort under the matrix.org project; we need more and more federated communications platforms. See https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/dendrite/
* Work on Go lang. implementations (or for that matter any other language/platform implementations) of fediverse servers, clients, platforms, etc...because we need more and more federated options for social networks. (Ok, maybe "need" is too string a term here.) There are existing options (mastodon, pleroma, etc.), but if I've learned anything, its that, diversity is essential.
* Work on LineageOS , or any other similar, viable alternatives to android or ios ...because - sorry, no offense - we need more and more options than simply google and apple for mobile phones/devices (and with liberty, freedom of choice, and privacy in mind).
I hope i wasn't being too presumptuous, but figured I'd at least it a shot at giving you ideas. Finally, I wish you the best of luck with your new endeavors!!!
Every few years, I’ve found my life intersect with his. Through various jobs (and even careers), he’s been a constant person in my online orbit. When I moved to Seattle 2.5 years ago, it was fitting that Brad lives here too and even more fitting that he knows many of my coworkers, albeit in a completely different way.
Brad is one of the smartest people I’ve bet met and probably ever will meet. LiveJournal was the basis — both in idea and in technology (memcached, oauth), the basis for Facebook, WordPress, and Tumblr. I’ve long said he’s the most important Web 2.0 pioneer most people have never heard of. He’s also a fantastic person.
I for one can’t wait to see what he decides do do next and how he’ll next change the world.
He was once Chief Architect at Six Apart, developers of the Perl-based Movable Type blogging platform which once rivaled Wordpress.
Thanks for helping make that connection for me!
Other than it was fine, but personally I preferred my PHP frameworks, which were just better. Not WordPress, WordPress survived it unfortunately.
In under half that time at another, comparable tech company I hit well over half his number of desk changes.
Moving desk at least twice a year is low?
Where do you work so I never try to apply?
Why do you think it's a big deal to switch desks every 6 months or so? My company does the move for me, so all I have to do is put my few things in a box and label it (and my computer stuff). Takes 30 minutes tops.
Just asking since I have multiple servers running it right now, and will need to migrate if it is going to be abandoned.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo/9N4YXAuX...
I no longer pay Mathieu to work on it full time, and my time is tempered by 2.5 and 0.5 year old kids.
I still use it, but don't have time to add to it much. Others work on it a bit. Mathieu and I did work on https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp just recently, to fix the Google Photos importer. So it's still moving a bit. Others still work on it too.
I'll pick up my involvement again as kids get a bit older. (One is almost potty trained and starting preschool soon! :))
We have no plans to abandon it.
Thanks a tonne for your contribution to it.
I also have young kids and struggle to even find the time to set up and use a Perkeep instance much less learn the internals or hack on it. But yeah, the whole business of de-cloudifying our lives and reclaiming privacy is going to be so important in coming years and decades.
I thought this would be true for me, but it turned out the other way. The chores of toddler care are slowly replaced as the kids become more verbal. Playing a game or having a conversation with my kids now is enormously pleasurable—to the point where I’ve become acutely aware of the time trade off of other projects.
Once kids get their own personalities you actually want to spend more time with them, understanding and developing their interests.
In between work and kid sports (or music, or scouts or whatever else) commitments the time the kids spend entertaining themselves is important parental 'downtime' and personal projects often just have to wait, potentially forever, depending on one's ambition and sleep requirements.
I now actively resist pulling many of the threads that interest me, just because I know it'll be yet another half-complete mess that's fundamentally less important than the development of the kids. Choose your side projects wisely (Perkeep sounds like a wise one).
Good to know its going to be maintained but reading between the lines, it is not "the next thing" you are going to work on from your post.
Doesn't sound very nice or supportive when you ask it this way.
Just look at mathematicians and their mentors and people they mentored, famous names everywhere!
It's not a coincidence.
I wrote about this when I first joined Google, having noticed the same prior to joining:
https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html
That was my big fear of joining Google, being sucked into the black hole.
(Ignore the later part of the post about the App Engine app that I couldn't keep running because App Engine kept breaking me all the time.)
Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec (which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one of the early Go engineers. He's featured in Coders at Work.
Same with other tech luminaries from that time period: Jamie Zawinski (xemacs, Netscape), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek, StackOverflow, Trello), Paul Buchheit (GMail, Friendfeed), Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (XP, WikiWikiWeb), et al. Don't hear about them much these days, and when one of Kent Beck's more recent posts was featured on Hacker News people were like "Who is this guy?"
Thank you, Brad.
I hear about Brad every single day because I follow him on Twitter. It's just a question about where you consume your information from.
Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts.
This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward.
In any case, I'll be curious to see where Brad ends up next.
I think it could really have replaced all the fragmented around Google comment forms, but it sure wasn't wise to force everyone on YouTube on it in such a shitty way. I think that initial public outcry was a significant stop to its velocity, yet it could have become moderately successful and very valuable long-term to slowly integrate all of Google's services. Just so many parts of the execution were questionable, including the mobile apps :\
Was the lack of a semi-immediate huge return the reason it was killed?
(I also suspect some of it comes from people looking at Apple's historic "make simple things simple" approach to UX and taking the wrong lessons from it, which arguably includes latter-day Apple, but that's a whole different post...)
Facebook had incredible granularity with regard to who could view one's posts — then they nerfed it by letting the people who are on your "lists" view who else is on them. (I'm private enough to not want people to know that they're on my Close Friends list with 30 other people.)
There was a way to get around this nerf by including a "smart list" in your set, but Facebook recently removed "smart lists" altogether.
My Facebook post privacy settings are a mess now, and I also gave up and stopped posting anything personal.
(I wanted to add that I used LiveJournal a lot in the early 2000's, and their friend list feature was amazing.)
Like first hearing about Gaiman's Sandman 15 years after it came out and thinking it would have been right up my alley 15 years ago.
I'm wondering if they will be able to sustain this now that the Google brand-name is not specifically being seen as a good thing anymore.
That just seems like poor planning. If he knew he was leaving, he should have scheduled a one hour session each week for the last five. :)
Also, turns out you can only have one outstanding reservation at a time (so I can't have one all-day massage on my last day) and can't gift them to other employees.
Oh well.
That's how they get ya man.
Can some talented writer please make a book called "Boredom At Work" that compiles essays from people who quit due to boredom and then went on to do great things?
> many Google-internal CLs ("change lists" == commits == PRs)
> 3,064 Android CLs
> 10,787 Go CLs
This is at least an average of 3 commits a day (4 if he didn't work weekends). How is that possible?
Github claims I have 3,135 in 2017, 2,361 in 2018 and 1,855 in 2019. 7,351 in 3 years.
that was the workflow at my previous place of work, so it just became my workflow habitually.
I'm certainly not exceptionally productive or skilled or anything - I just try to make my commits as small as possible. Commit early, commit often.
• https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors
• https://github.com/golang/build/graphs/contributors
Brad also once gave a lightning talk about HTTP/2 that had 80+ slides in 5 minutes. He’s very fast.
One of my favorite bradfitz moments (and there were a number) was when I was on the spam and abuse team, and the two of us were talking about chat protocols, likely in the context of preventing spam, and he brought up XMPP. I asked what that was (I had known it simply as "Jabber") and he looked at me in wonderment that I didn't know that.
Livejournal, memcached, go, those are three hugely impactful things. Let the number continue to increase!
I also moved from San Francisco to Seattle recently without really asking for permission, and while there's a lot to do in Seattle, there's much more to do in the Bay Area.
Good luck BradFitz!
What is diff in 'Google C++' and 'C++'?
The preferred pattern now is to use factory functions that can return either a fully-initialized object or an error.
Not every error is exceptional so not every error should use exceptions. This is especially important in lower level code where someone's exception is someone else's expected code path.
Thank you. Software poetry they are to me.
And this one: > met Googler wife
Best wishes, Brad Fitz
Thanks for everything, best wishes for your new venture!
Met you in a Golang conf and talked about some client libraries for Go for AWS. You were really helpful and motivating.
Best of luck to whatever you are building. On a personal level, I hope someday I get to work with you in some project :)
When I worked at eBay I changed desks more than once a year.
At Netflix it was really abnormal that I sat in the same place for three years. That was largely due to the fact that a special area was built for the SREs with an area for guests to hot desk during incidents and we didn't want to rebuild that.
Pretty much everyone else that reported to my Director moved away before we finally had to move buildings.
(Edit: it's a joke. But I accept the down votes)
I haven't hear about it for a very long time. Is it still something the team was working on ?
And if yes, does the fact that Brad is leaving going to impact a lot on the development ?
This is my biggest worry and fear, so easy to just rest and vest. It's hard, as humans, to do something new and risky. Props to you, Brad.
... But if you are responsible for today's downage just say it. : )
I think that's pretty common around 40 years old. The career just doesn't feel as challenging as it used to.
I'm very curious what happens to Fuchsia. It's very ambitious and might be amazing, but in a weird state right now where it's open source but they don't talk about it (or document it) much.
Many probably already looking forward to what your "building something new" will be! :)
Leaving Google means he won't be working (at least not directly as he is currently employed to) on that stuff, so the interest is from two angles: what affect might this have on the direction of the projects he is leaving, and what is he moving on to influence next.
Me leaving my current job wouldn't make HN because I don't have any such significance. I'd wager the same could be said of almost everybody, but, demonstrably, not him.
Makes me happy to see this still happening despite the current climate.