It's nice that a company has senior engineers that are known by name and looked up to. It shows that engineers are valued, and a meritocracy exists.
He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine that ran for over a decade... numerous improvements to search and ads quality (back in the days when search and ads quality meant something)... and that was just the first few years.
The way jeff described it was that there was a very early contingent who took Larry's original code and made a production system out of it, but it wasn't very good- the indexer basically had to be run all the way through without errors to make a new index- and that was delaying a release of a fresh new index, so results were getting stale. At that point Jeff "invented" mapreduce (the shuffle stage was Sanjay) and wrote the new indexer and the search engine as well.
I'm not aware of any LISP implementation of the Google search engine; if there was one, it would have been extremely early, like in the stanford days, I think.
yep
> and a meritocracy exists
not necessarily. It shows the system got one excellent engineer to an appropriate position. But it doesn't show that the system isn't promoting bozos too, and keeping other excellent engineers down.
Has anyone worked at GOOG and also other corporations? How do the alternative cultures compare?