Thread

1. GodelNumbering · 1785950655 · focus · HN ↗

   So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner

   And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

   Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen

   1. frollogaston · 1785953588 · focus · HN ↗

      Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

      1. Cidan · 1785972523 · focus · HN ↗

         Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         1. bushbaba · 1785982097 · focus · HN ↗

            the processes are a result of repeated lawsuit
         2. coderatlarge · 1785986543 · focus · HN ↗

            except for most other companies in the world.
         3. arthurjj · 1786038825 · focus · HN ↗

            I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc.

            But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

            1. frollogaston · 1786044409 · focus · HN ↗

               I still don't understand why all that dynamic config stuff isn't just Python. Sure, static configs should be protos, but GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. Have heard some language purity rants involving determinism, but I don't buy it. And they keep inventing new stuff like Starlark. They need to stop.

               1. ragall · 1786051228 · focus · HN ↗

                  > GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python.

                  The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra language there is.

            2. ragall · 1786051031 · focus · HN ↗

               > I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated.

               In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful.

               > But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

               I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

               1. arthurjj · 1786055971 · focus · HN ↗

                  > I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

                  I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?

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