Ask HN: does everything known by Google engineers exist in books? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: does everything known by Google engineers exist in books?

14 pointsmrwnmonm12 comments

not just Google, but any great company with really good engineers, is everything they know (i don't mean about their products, i mean their knowledge as developers) anyone can find it in books or any other material. i just sometimes feel that they have some kind of knowledge above everyone else, and you can't find it except by learning it directly from them. for example: building high scale service. where you can learn to build something like that? and to be good as google's?

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Foundational knowledge? Yes, pretty much, especially if you take an expansive view of "books" to include all written / textual media (ie, including journal articles, web pages, etc.)

But in the case of Google, it's pretty clear that they are constantly pushing the boundaries, sometimes doing original research, and creating new knowledge as they go. So, no, I don't think you could say that everything they know is in "the literature".

If I had to break it down percentage wise, my subjective feeling would be that it's something like 90% "broadly known stuff" and "10% unique in-house knowledge", or something along those lines.

At the least, I would urge you not to ascribe god-like / superhuman powers/knowledge to the engineers at Google, or Facebook, or Yahoo, or Microsoft or Amazon or whoever. They're all working off the same core CS principles everyone is, they're just smart people working on hard problems and sometimes they discover some new interesting things. But, if you, as a smart person, work on hard and interesting problems, you're also going to discover some new and interesting things as well.

for example: building high scale service. where you can learn to build something like that?

A lot of knowledge about building "web scale" services is moving so fast that it's not necessarily in dead tree books, but that doesn't mean it isn't documented somewhere. That said, a lot of good stuff is in dead tree books. Try looking at http://highscalability.com/ for example, and peruse the "real world architectures" section, then look at their Amazon AStore for a good list of useful books. http://astore.amazon.com/possiboutpos-20

But if you want the very latest developments on various technologies - load balancers, web servers, big-data stuff, databases, a lot of the newest stuff is going to be on mailing lists, in blog posts, web pages and the like. Books tend to lag.

thanks, i really appreciate your answer

Books are typically quite a bit out of date if it's a rapidly progressing field.

More stuff ends up in journal articles, but about a year or so behind the actual work, and at a level of detail which is often problematic to reproduce. You typically have to treat it as a reverse engineering problem - but once you know the core ideas, that's often possible.

Then there's the mountain of "trade secrets" which never get published anywhere. A lot of compelling work in e.g. graphics falls under this case - although you might see a demo and overview at SIGGRAPH.

Publishing tends to be a net positive for serious commercial research work, even if the release has to be delayed. It's a solid process for documenting internal knowledge. It's also one of the main things that's going to interest other researchers in working for you.

Consider 2 types of knowledge:

- knowing that XYZ is the case, knowledge of facts, or "propsitional knowledge" as a philosopher might call it - probably a heck of a lot of Google engineers' knowledge of this type (except stuff which is personal to them, like what they did last tuesday or the content of some private source code) is in books.

- knowing how to do XYZ or "performative" or "procedural knowledge" - this sort of knowledge you can try and convey in literature, but often some lived experience is necessary to acquire it. Practising martial arts for 20 years might produce a different order of "knowing kung fu" than reading about it without the practice (Neo notwithstanding, the lived experience was artificially implanted there.)

I don't know, but I'd guess the knowledge you're impressed by is largely of the second type.

Many large engineering organizations have internal document collections that detail past research and lessons learned. Google may be the most visible engineering organization, but many quiet financial and defense-oriented organizations have a wealth of information available, once you are inside. This info is commonly very specialized, so it would be unlikely to help you build the most scalable website or awesome mobile app, but might be useful in creating a toaster-oven that can survive a 100ft drop, being run over by a tank and lasting for 200 years.

Any engineering firm can develop a world-class knowledge base. But, that involves an engineering process, like starting projects with statements of work and conducting internal engineering reviews at certain milestones (all documented in whitepapers), not just by creating a Trello card or JIRA issue.

Google staff members sometimes publish papers about their recent work: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

Every industry has operational knowledge that is passed from person to person; that's why you'll often see younger companies hiring experienced people from older companies. In many cases you could rediscover that knowledge from first-hand experience, but it would take 10-15 years.

It a matter of collective synergy of brains and thinking by the vastly experience engineers that results to the wonder u see. Books are hard particalarly technical and programming books thats why u cant get the knowledge from book. #imho

so how to be as good as they are?

Get ur hands dirty with code, solve problems and neva be a lazy jerk. BTW books and skuls like lynda.com can help

Learn the fundamentals, then work on hard problems. Hang out with as many really smart people - also working on hard problems - as you can. Read obsessively. Experiment and don't be afraid to fail from time to time.

Perhaps. But there is also knowledge from experience, which may not always be written down. But having knowledge from experience is not limited to Google Engineers.

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