Let Me Google That For You.
A reflection upon Google and Peter Dickman’s Leeds University talk of 30th April.
Poster for the event. Courtesy of Ben Blundell www.section9.co.uk
It was with anticipation I walked to Roger Stevens on Thursday afternoon a familiar and yet consistently weird place. As first year computing students we were informed by a certain member of the department that we ‘have to go to this one‘, a Google talk, a chat from the big hitters, might be interesting. The room was a strange mix, the sheparded undergraduate alongside postgrad and senior staff, something for everyone here.
The size of the beast
Comedy name aside, Peter himself looked pretty confident and damn right you would be if you’d landed that job. His delivery was constant, and amazing things came out of his mouth at every juncture. “Every 4 hours google crawls more than the whole library of congress“. WOW. The size of the beast began to strike me. A company so big that they have designed their own file system ‘BigTable’, and inhouse programming languages.
Google doesn’t have datacentres, they instead have ‘warehouse computers’, the name change signifying as much about progress in parallelism, scale and networking innovation as lexical horseplay. Indeed Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is attributed to have said “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.”. In layman’s and geek terms this was pretty impressive stuff.
Google’s has an almost poetic goal of ‘Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful‘, sounds a pretty selfless and compelling endeavour doesn’t it? However, it wasn’t soon till were reminded of the company’s fortune, the size of which equates to a small African country, ‘there’s gold in them there hills‘. Having conquered somewhat traditional search engine ground, Google has recently been turning its attentions to image, audio, map and interplanetary indexing and searching. Similar images, Audio indexing, Streetview and Google Mars respectively are impressive examples.
Geekocracy
“A third of our software engineers have PhD’s and MSc’s” Peter informed us, and speaking with apparent sincerity told us how the software engineers (Programmers in plain language) had been programming since they were 5. I soon began to envision some sort of utopian geek meritocracy (Geekocracy if you will). I wasn’t far wrong. Staff get 20% of their time to dedicate to working on new ideas. In this so called ‘Innovation Time’, big software eggs are hatched, apps like Gmail. Adsense and Google Moderator, a tool for deciding which questions should get asked at meetings have their genesis here. Check out googlelabs.com for yourself.
Peter Dickman at the talk. Image provided courtesy of Ben Blundell www.section9.co.uk
Google continued to come across as a Valhalla for programmers and IT staff. Google’s network technicians in the field were spoken of heroically traversing inhospitable territory to fix cable breaks. These are the guys that usually get looked down upon as the unplug and plug in the computer guys. Score one for the team. Software Engineers come above managers in the pecking order and their managers exist to get them the tools they need to get the job done. Programmers have the opportunity to work across the whole codebase on any project or application that they like, in fact they are positively encouraged to do so.
The Google way
It becomes clear that part of the explanation Google’s incredible success lies in their differences from traditional corporate business models. The culture of creative engagement of its staff, their sustained passion for continual daily improvement clearly show results. This is the Google ethos, the Google way, the reason my homepage is www.google.com and why sometimes when people ask me questions I say “let me google that for you“.
