Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student

infolab.stanford.edu

139 pointskrat0sprakhar53 comments

Sergey and Larry didn't code much though. This one's hilarious:

In the book, early Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein says "I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders." "I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." One Google engineer from back then says the most remarkable thing about the co-founders' code was that when it broke, users would see funny error message: "Whoa, horsey!" It turns out the developers most responsible for building the Google that quickly became the Web's most powerful company are two guys you've probably never heard of. The first is Urs Hözle. According to one early Googler quoted by Edwards, Hözle was "the key" to Google's early success. Edwards writes, "Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code." The second is Jeff Dean. Edwards writes that "Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding." "It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school."

Interesting anecdotes. Which book is this from?

"I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" By Douglas Edwards Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0547416997

Are there any samples of that elegant code available online?

The best source of the early Google codebase is a talk given by Jeff Dean himself. The talk describes Google1997, Google1999, Google2001, Google2004, Google2007 in some considerable details, from architectural diagrams to low-level bit packing tricks.

http://research.google.com/people/jeff/WSDM09-keynote.pdf

It's an overview of highly-optimized solutions to difficult problems, I am more interested in elegant code (beautiful + maintainable) - this is why I asked. Something makes me skeptical there could be any at such stage, when shipping is most important.

Urs Hölzle, not Hözle. (Obviously, I heard of him.)

In 1994, Urs Hölzle and Lars Bak (yes, the one who wrote V8) co-founded a startup that wrote the fastest implementation of Smalltalk in the world. In 1997, Sun bought it and based HotSpot JVM on it. In 1999, Urs Hölzle joined Google as an employee #8.

Ah Jeff Dean, of Jeff Dean facts: https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/TSDhe5CvaFe

And yes, it seems there's a split between the algorithm creators and the code maintainers, unfortunatelly research code is good for that usually (research), but bad in memory usage, readability, speed, maintainability, etc.

Looks like 'view source' reveals the true motivation, commented out ;-)

Another comment:

    <!-- <IMG ALIGN=LEFT SRC="pics/diamond.gif">
    <H4><A HREF="/cgi-bin/sergey/HyperNews/get/forums/datamine.html">Data
    Mining</A></H4>
    I have recently acquired an interest in data mining and started up a
    meeting group.<P>-->

I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that “view source” was not as easy as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when “frontend development” was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn’t matter as long as it rendered correctly. It’d be like looking at a candidate’s PDF resume in a hex editor.

Right click to view source goes way back.

But you are right, hiring managers probably wouldn't do it.

Eh more like HTML 2.0 and yes you could view source. And the spec for the 3.x release was 3.2, not 3

No one called it JavaScript 1 or CSS 1, well maybe they called it CSS 1 by the body standards. But it was, "hey you can change text color without switching font tags with CSS!" But no one really called it, "JavaScript 1." And assuming this was last edited Jan '96, probably wouldn't have CSS in there.

Ah OK, I was just going off of a quick glance at a Wikipedia timeline.

And I’m saying “CSS 1” etc. the same way people call the original Playstation “PS1”. Hindsight is always versioned.

View Source was there in even early versions of browers. Mosaic had it. And lynx had the ability to dump the raw HTML. Most people on the web at that point also knew you could just telnet to port 80.

I would go so far to say that viewing source was the way a lot of people learned. If you saw something on the web you couldn't figure out how to do, you'd view source to learn a new trick.

I also don't think it would be a big deal to have a joke like that in your web resume. Few outside of hardcore geeks were on the web. There was no LinkedIn. Recruiters didn't use the web. Executives didn't. It was unlikely your hiring manager did & if he did, he'd likely appreciate the humor. It's like hiding a joke in kernel module you wrote. If they're the kind of people looking there, they'll have an appreciation for it.

This is the time when you came in and could quickly scan the whats new on the internet menu on mosaic :-)

Maybe he included such info originally, later thought employer might not like it so commented out

I had attended a talk by Vint Cerf at Stanford where he had posited that the reason the web took off was because people could see the HTML source of websites and start writing their own HTML.This, he believed, led to the exponential growth of web content. So, I guess then, "view source" was quite common.

That's definitely true, speaking as someone who learned HTML in '96 or 97 mostly by reading other people's HTML source.

"His website is not Web 2.0 - doesn't fit our company"

"Doesn't say machine learning on his site - behind the times"

"Doesn't know Map-Reduce and Hadoop"

Yeah, I think we should pass on this candidate

Just because he could have started the company 15 years ago doesn't mean he's a good candidate to hire now.

Three internships at well-known companies(Wolfram and GE), CS degree from Stanford, knows Python - with that resume you can get 10 offers in two weeks if you schedule interviews right.

"Ph.D.: expected June 1997."

Ah, someone else who didn't finish their doctorate and ended up working for Google instead. We're like kindred spirits, Sergey and I...

From MSc to PhD in 2 year's time... in Spain this is the time you are expected to figure out what to research about. No doubt why Spain needs a bailout. So much to learn.

... So much to learn. So much time.

I don't think 2 years is typical for a PhD (even after already earning a M.Sc)

This may be just a sign of the quality of research Sergey was doing which has, as we know now, fairly useful applications :-)

Years later and I still haven't seen decent and working LaTeX to HTML converter.

"It is unique in that it is in written mostly TeX and hence is a somewhat more elegant design than other converters. A small portion of it is written in Perl."

I have no conception of how any software written mostly in TeX with a little bit of Perl could have "elegant design" as a selling point.

For sufficiently simple documents you’re probably better of writing the master in a simple but structured format such as asciidoc[1] and then convert to whatever display format you like. However, if you do heavy math notation or other kinds of advanced formatting, I’m not sure this method will work that well.

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

I know the resume is just solid for today's standards, but do keep in mind that his research/work on data/ML is from 1990s -- and at that day and age this was cutting edge research, and people who leveraged this gained significant competitive advantages once they figured out how to properly execute.

I started doing ML work in 2007-8 and even 5-6 years ago it wasn't the hot domain yet that it is now.

Recruiters take note. Content >> style. He worked on some interesting projects but the writeup would be deemed "unprofessional" and his resume would be tossed to the bin by a huge chunk of HR departments/firms I've had relations with.

Would have been interesting to use a slightly altered version of this for a blind "which person would you hire" test.

Nonesense, this is HTML from 1996. You will need to resize your browser window, at the least.

I don't think the above commenter is talking about the look of it when he/she says "style," rather he/she is referring to the way it is written.

sigh so funny you had to actually clarify that.

Would Sergei make a good employee?

Do entrepreneurs ever make good employees?

If you're a VC, har har har har

On which note: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...

where?

My thought too, especially when I noticed the typo:

"...similar tastes to extrapolate how much the you will like some other movies..."

and to put it into google to see if he woudl get hired today :-)

I think the most interesting bit is that Sergey Brin was such an early adopter of python in its infancy. I'm guessing this resume is from 1993-4. Python was released 1991.

edit: nevermind, from the Masters date it sounds like its 95-97

well you have probably exact date in the title of document ;)

His home page from his Stanford days is pretty sweet, got to love his use of gifs. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/

“Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page.”

This is beyond trippy.

Does anyone know what the class with him and Larry Page (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/) was like?

That would be a great AMA

I think its interesting that he was able to gain admission into Stanford without having any conference papers in his undergrad years - I guess his grades and other research made up for it.

And his CV as an adult:

http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv-photo

It's a pretty solid resume, but I've seen a dozen better ones that don't belong to billionaires... Unless...

Sorry, gotta update my LinkedIn.

Because the road to success is to copy successful people. Right?

Heh, the Movie Rating project is cute (who hasn't done that?).

if sergey and larry didn't code much, why do they care about making engineering-centric culture, instead of focusing on the business around engineering?

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