SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2005 Enough about me... POSTED BY DOUG AT 7:19 AM In my first post here, I invited other Xooglers to join me in reminiscing about life back in the day. Ron Garret has accepted that invitation. Ron was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, and the experience affected him so fundamentally that even his name changed. It was great having Ron on the staff for many reasons, not the least of which was that he nicely filled out our hyperbole portfolio. We'd been talking about how smart our technology was and after Ron joined us from the Jet Propulsion Lab, we could truthfully say that, "Yes, Google is so complex that we have both a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist working on it." Welcome Ron... 1 COMMENTS: Ron said... Thanks Doug! I'll try to get a first post up later today. 10:22 AM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2005 Hello, world POSTED BY RON AT 1:13 PM The first post is always the hardest. I've been debating with myself whether or not to write about my Google experience at all. It seems like such a self-indulgent thing to do, and, while in retrospect it has certainly turned out quite well, there were some bumps along the way (to put it mildly) and I did some things that I'm not altogether proud of. On the other hand, I've always enjoyed being on the receiving end of a good inside scoop, so now that I'm in a position to share an experience that others seem to care about I feel like I ought to do so. Besides, they say confession is good for the soul. A very brief summary to set the stage: I worked as a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher at the Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 until 2000 when I went to work for Google as a software engineer. I was there for just over a year. I worked on two main projects, the first release of AdWords, and a little known widget called the Translation Console. If you go to Google's preferences page you will see that Google is available in well over 100 languages, including Klingon and Elmer Fudd. (There used to be a Swedish Chef option, but that seems to have succumbed to political correctness.) All those translations are provided by volunteers around the world. The interface they use to do the translating is the translation console (officially called the Google In Your Language Program). As far as I can tell it hasn't changed much since I wrote it. I'm pretty proud of that. I guess the #1 FAQ for people who have left Google is why did you leave. My main reason for leaving was that I was commuting from Los Angeles. I'd fly up on Southwest early Monday morning, fly back on Thursday evening, and telecommute on Fridays and weekends. That regimen was pretty stressful even under the best of circumstances, but when 9/11 happened it became completely untenable. I had already given my notice before 9/11, but I don't think I could have stayed on after that even if I had wanted to. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I've said, my story is not entirely rosy, so I want to make a sort of blanket disclaimer, and to do that I have to indulge in a little bit of tooting of my own horn. I have a Ph.D. in computer science. I was a senior scientist at JPL when I went to Google, and when I returned to JPL I was promoted to Principal, the highest rung on their technical career ladder. (Actually, it turns out there are higher rungs, but their existence in not publicly known.) I am generally considered to be a pretty bright guy. I am tooting my horn to put the following assessment in perspective: at Googe, if I were to rate people on general smartness I would have put myself in the bottom 25%. It was pretty much the first time in my life that I found myself not at the top of the intellectual pecking order. It was not an easy adjustment for me. But I'm getting ahead of myself again. I wanted to say this up front because since the IPO there has been a steady chorus of criticism along the lines of, "Google has little real value and it's only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down like a bad flashback to February 2000." In my humble but better-informed-than-most opinion this is all sour grapes. Google is a valuable company because the people who built it are incredibly smart and they work incredibly hard. I feel priveleged to have been a (small) part of it. There are many valid criticisms of Google (and I expect I'll be making some of my own), but that they have built little of real value is not among them. I'm not saying this because I want to kiss up to Sergey (as one commentor suggested might be the motivation for one of Doug's postings). I have no need to kiss up to anyone any more (and, though I don't have any firsthand knowledge, I strongly suspect that Doug doesn't either). I'm saying it because Google has taken a lot of bashing Some of it was well deserved IMO (like when Google blacklisted CNet for doing a story that included personal information on CEO Eric Schmidt which was obtained by doing a Google search), but most of it was (and is) not, and I just wanted to stand up and say so. With that out of the way, I'll get on with the story. 9 COMMENTS: http://search-engines-web.com/ said... ... if I were to rate people on general smartness I would have put myself in the bottom 25%. Hmmm,...how are you defining & rating Intelligence ??????? W h a t is o f g r a v e c o n c e r n is - if everyone there is so-o esoteric, and SEARCH has now become a "common persons" resource, Can they really empathize and understand the needs and habits of the so-called less extreme intelligent members of the Human Race who dominate their customers (and the world)? T he interview where you were asked for your SAT and GPA scores makes one wonder if they are only focussing a very LIMITED portion of Human Intelligence. H om o Sapiens are so varied and verstile, hopefully the channels of communication will open up to include and understand the masses in what is becoming a universal source of information retrieval! H o p e fu lly th e masses will ALSO be allowed to contribute to Google's evolution ;-) 3:55 PM Ron said... Hmmm,...how are you defining & rating Intelligence ? A g o o d question, and I'm actually planning a whole post to answer it. 4:30 PM Ron said... Oh, I guess I should mention too that they didn't ask me my GPA or my SAT score. (I suspect they reserved that for the non-technical folks.) 4:34 PM Milly said... Ron, the Swedish Chef lives! It's under "Bork, bork, bork!" in that prefs page dropdown. It even had some utility for a year or so: selecting that language brought back the old blue and white tabs (and less tricky Groups) design. But they've fixed that now (hey, some security holes take 'em longer) : w w w .im illy .c o m / g o o g le -cookie.htm#bork O nce there's enough of you xooglers gathered, maybe you could do an exit reasons survey. I wonder if many would cite the growth from jetski to supertanker as a reason? I n J u ly M a r is s a M a y e r s a id "We are planning on releasing some alternatives in the next one to two months that make our current captchas more compatible with screen readers ...". Yet here we are with most Google services, Blogger comments included, still using evil visually- oriented captchas: www.w3.org/TR/turingtest. A p p a re n tly it tak e s time for a supertanker to change course ... 5:58 PM Milly said... Oh, and Doug - how about an RSS feed for the comments? 6:04 PM Anonymous said... I'm looking forward to seeing the comments on intelligence as I am very interested in how it manifests itself in terms of how Google makes decisions as well as how well the technology works. H ere is an exam ple. A long time ago, some Google employees claimed that it was not possible for their index to be spammed because their algorithms were powerful enough to defeat any spam attempts. I think they did not take into account the economics of the Internet -- in particular, that web sites (and therefore links) could be built rather cheaply. What I want to understand is what aspect of intelligence does reaching this type of conclusion fall into and to what extent it factors in the hiring process. D isclaim ers: I have been turned down for employment by Google. No sour grapes -- I realize it is like getting into Harvard; some very intelligent people don't get in. Also, I used to work for another search engine that ran into trouble and got sold.