Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

TBH author sounds like a bit of a broccoli from their time at Google. The public sees this same attitude "in the wild" though, with Kubernetes, which is a thoroughly inappropriate solution in many cases (but is absolutely right in some). But once you've bitten that bug, if there's a computer problem, step 1 is going to always be "first, set up a kubernetes cluster because I've forgotten how to computer without that".

If, during an interview, someone couldn't move past "well, I'd just use kubernetes" or give other possible solutions then I could see myself questioning how appropriate they are for a role and consider other candidates.

View on HN

What is a broccoli?

I am also interested in this expression. Google searching turns up nothing, except maybe a reference to marijuana.

So maybe 'broccoli' is their way of saying craziness? Like being on Google drugs. But obviously that's not a perfect fit. Maybe its a misspelling of something else?

No one in Google uses this as an expression. It's close to something people actually do reference, but it's not described like this.

It’s a reference to an internal Google comedy video mocking these tendencies (one of the characters is an anthropomorphic broccoli)

As another commenter said, it's a reference to an internal parody video about how hard it is to do simple things at Google. It was made with some video generation software with stock animated characters and synthesized voices. I found Broccoli Man playing another role here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d0TVpCIyLY

In the internally famous Google video, Broccoli Man was the jaded production-savvy SWE/SRE who told the earnest SWE (Panda Woman, I think?) what hoops she needs to jump through to launch her service. Among the most famous lines: her "I just want to serve 5TB of data" to his "I forgot how to count that low".

The video had a huge impact because it was funny and had more than a little bit of truth to it. Lots of Google infrastructure was oriented toward huge problems and required the same heavyweight processes for things that aren't so huge. It inspired a bunch of changes to simplify deploying small (by Google standards) services. Many small things are still difficult at Google, but a bit less so now.

I've only said and heard "I forgot how to count that low" as a reference to this video, making fun of the unexpected difficulty of doing something small rather than actually making fun of someone for wanting to do something small.

Funny how memes can sometimes shift culture that much. I love it.

I can confirm that this is a reference to an entertaining internal video with Fox Girl and Broccoli Man. Fox Girl just wanted to serve 5TB of data and Broccoli Man was explaining the many, many steps of configuration, services, and monitoring that were required to do this at Google. I agree with scottlamb; I only heard "I don't know how to count that low" in reference to the video, not as a "sign of superiority" that the post describes.

The video was also described briefly here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/06/5tb/

I wish I had taken a picture of that shirt before it had been run through the wash a few times. It used to look a whole lot better!

But yeah, that video was epic, and it was spot-on, too. A company that has no idea how to deal with people is going to suck at making tools _for_ people.

I miss those internal Google culture things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082014

I think you are basically wrong about k8s. It's true that sometimes Netlify or Heroku is easier, but if those are too pricey or not flexible enough, k8s is pretty much the best mainstream app ↔ metal interface.

The doesn't mean it's the best — at home I use something different — but for your average business environment it's the safest choice.

Given the choices between app->k8s->vm->metal, app->vm->metal, app->k8s->metal, or app->metal, a lot of businesses really should be choosing the ones without k8s in the chain. Sometimes a single VM, with a hot spare ready for manual failover, is plenty.

Our GCP machines that are behind a Load Balancer are all app->vm->metal. Works fine. People keep bringing up kubernetes but it adds nothing.

it's a standard like Ansible. if you already have a great configuration management / deployment tool, then you likely wouldn't gain much

Disagree. I've been on both sides of those choices, and the containerized deployment infrastructure is much nicer to work with, as a software developer. And I think it is less annoying for ops folks too, but I'm less sure about that.

If ops is handling ops and you're using automated CI/CD, then all you need to do as a software developer is "git push," and it doesn't matter whether it's containers, VMs, or bare metal running the code, nor does it matter what's orchestrating the containers, VMs, or raw servers.

I've also done everything from bare servers to VMs to containers, in varying capacities. For small teams with fewer than millions of users, the fewer moving parts the better. One monolithic app scaled mostly vertically, one database scaled mostly vertically, and maybe one caching layer scaled horizontally, will be far more productive for development.

I dunno, I've done it both ways. I spent about a decade in small companies using all sorts of different kinds of ops solutions, from custom bash scripts on bare metal to capistrano on on-prem VMs to chef on those VMs to chef on AWS to heroku and some things in between all that. I did not at all see all the devops changes of the last five years as unnecessary complexity, I felt all the pain that solutions like those from hashicorp and docker and kubernetes are trying to soothe. And then I went and got a job at a big company with a mature containerized deployment infrastructure and it's just better. It's not like it's easy, but it totally solves the "blank sheet of paper" problem. You don't have to invent some deployment scheme to prototype or launch a new service, you just go figure out how to write the config code and where to put the build artifacts and run a couple commands and voila. Yes, it requires up front investment to get to that point, but if you see yourself as the kind of company that is going to be iterating on new ideas, entering new markets, creating new products, solving scaling problems, just anything that ends up with a lot of cycles of launching new services, then I really think the investment is worth it. Maybe that's still a niche case, maybe not many businesses really fit this, but honestly those that don't aren't really the kinds of businesses I want to work for.

"when that's explicitly the wrong answer for that interview question"

So to clarify: You're asking some sort of an interview question that is to some degree subjective, and then penalizing people when they have an "incorrect" opinion?

A better approach would be to discuss why they have that opinion and why they would go that route over another one.

You're not wrong :)

I discuss my opinion a bit more in depth upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28990879 but we don't actually know what happened, so it's impossible to say.

The candidate that is unable to explain any details about how linux containers actually work, other than to say "I used kubernetes at my last job" is getting picked after the person that actually understands how they work (given that we're hiring for a low-level linux role in this hypothetical :) ).

Or to frame it in a different way, how would you sort an array of numbers? The answer "I'd call array.sort()" isn't wrong per se, but there's an answer the interviewer is looking for and that's not it. If the interviewee furthermore becomes rude and aggressive about it and doesn't even know what time complexity is, that's a pass. (Not remotely suggesting that that's what happened here, but sometimes the biggest interview isn't official - if you're a raging asshole to the person at the reception desk, don't expect to get a callback.)

Does the original generator for those "Fox girl and broccoli man" videos still exist?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com