Life at Google
One of the problems I'm finding in working for Google is the confidentiality agreement. Not that I want to sell out confidential information to other companies, but my fingers are itching to tell all my friends about all the cool stuff that is going on at Google and the awesomeness that is coming up. But, alas, I can't. At most, I can give a feel for how it is to work here.
There's a lot of videoconferencing going on. It seems fairly natural to me, but it occurred to me in the middle of a session that this is a prime example of sufficiently advanced technology: It's the fabled magic mirror that will let people see each other and talk over long distances. But it's old hat these days:) Todays VC was the quarterly overview of all parts of Google and how they're getting towards their goals. I was left with a very conflicting feeling of inability to scale my brains to this size of operations, an excitement at all the cool things that are going on, an impression of the conflict between not being evil and having to make enough money to keep the thing going, and an idea that Vernor Vinge was overcautious in his prediction of the singularity.
Life here is certainly not going to be boring. There are things happening all the time, so it's more a question of filtering out what you don't need to go to than finding things to go to. That goes both within Google and around München. I've found a list of local gaming groups on the find of the day, the http://www.freizeitspass-muenchen.de/ - a triple event of gaming, creativity and research. There's not going to be enough weekend for all I want to do there. I'm also going to attempt to revive the Google gaming group, bringing down more games every time I'm home. And I haven't even started to look seriously at photo groups, hacker spaces or other of my interests.
I've dived into the code already, and I'm pretty happy with what I see. Code reviews are not just suggested, they are required, and the code shows it. It is a pleasure to work in it (even though I can't currently get IntelliJ to work with the Google tweaks, so I have to use Eclipse), and coding is probably going to take less time than figuring out how to design the UI. The old code I'm replacing is pretty awful, though, one file with 6000 lines of C++ code. Fortunately, I don't have to understand it, I just have to implement the main functionality in the new, pretty system.
I've previously talked about mind-boggling things when considering astronomy or geology or other things that are fairly abstract. But being in the middle of so much development in so little time is stretching my brain cells in a totally different manner. Which is probably good for them.
I will not be able to preannounce anything, of course, but I can at least mention when interesting things launch, and why they're cool.
There's a lot of videoconferencing going on. It seems fairly natural to me, but it occurred to me in the middle of a session that this is a prime example of sufficiently advanced technology: It's the fabled magic mirror that will let people see each other and talk over long distances. But it's old hat these days:) Todays VC was the quarterly overview of all parts of Google and how they're getting towards their goals. I was left with a very conflicting feeling of inability to scale my brains to this size of operations, an excitement at all the cool things that are going on, an impression of the conflict between not being evil and having to make enough money to keep the thing going, and an idea that Vernor Vinge was overcautious in his prediction of the singularity.
Life here is certainly not going to be boring. There are things happening all the time, so it's more a question of filtering out what you don't need to go to than finding things to go to. That goes both within Google and around München. I've found a list of local gaming groups on the find of the day, the http://www.freizeitspass-muenchen.de/ - a triple event of gaming, creativity and research. There's not going to be enough weekend for all I want to do there. I'm also going to attempt to revive the Google gaming group, bringing down more games every time I'm home. And I haven't even started to look seriously at photo groups, hacker spaces or other of my interests.
I've dived into the code already, and I'm pretty happy with what I see. Code reviews are not just suggested, they are required, and the code shows it. It is a pleasure to work in it (even though I can't currently get IntelliJ to work with the Google tweaks, so I have to use Eclipse), and coding is probably going to take less time than figuring out how to design the UI. The old code I'm replacing is pretty awful, though, one file with 6000 lines of C++ code. Fortunately, I don't have to understand it, I just have to implement the main functionality in the new, pretty system.
I've previously talked about mind-boggling things when considering astronomy or geology or other things that are fairly abstract. But being in the middle of so much development in so little time is stretching my brain cells in a totally different manner. Which is probably good for them.
I will not be able to preannounce anything, of course, but I can at least mention when interesting things launch, and why they're cool.