Inside the Google-Plex

tappytibbins writes "Baseline magazine has an in-depth story about how Google manages its own IT infrastructure. From the article: 'In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting.'"

print friendly version

[Anonymous Coward]

print friendly version [baselinemag.com], because their page layout is a little too far on the "hey, if we add more adverts, we'll make more money!!1!"/WiReD-more-colors-are-good end of the scale.

Also...

[Otter]

On a related note: "Behind the Glass Curtain: [metropolismag.com] Google's new headquarters balances its utopian desire for transparency with its very real need for privacy."

I'm still waiting for pictures of the "party plane", though.

Friendly

[wjsroot]

Its nice to know that some companies are willing to open their doors to the Tech comunity. Reminds me of Open Source Software... but only with hardware

It still worries me that google will soon know everything about everyone. I hope they dont share that data with ANYONE.

Re:I once had an interest in Google

[panaceaa]

What background do you have in software development? Currently Google interviews people for "core basics", which are the basic skills you would learn by going to university or trade school in the field related to your position. For example, when interviewing for the Java Developer Software Engineering position, you'll get a lot of questions about the collections library, synchronization, and core computer science questions like semaphores and two-phase commit. My experience with Java, and I know I'd completely fail a system administration interview.

Perhaps you should have informed your recruiter about your background?

Elevator Pitch Version:

[Ayanami Rei]

It's not the highly parallel clustered racks of custom-designed linux servers that makes Google Google. That's an enabling feature. Rather, it's their custom engineered application-level operating environment, if you will, which runs on top of that. It's good at keeping data, indexing attributes, finding it, breaking problems down, and intelligently routing work and results. The search engine and all their other apps are built on top of this, and it allows their engineers to leverage this common distributed platform in all of their external and internal applications.

=== End Elevator Summary ===

Not many companies are willing to write their own application layers to deploy services. Most companies CAN'T. It's just not worth it. It's worth it to Google because developing and deploying world-wide information retrieval services is their business.

However, a standardized Application OE that can run and take advantages of the resources of many potentially unreliable computing resources would be very valuable to many businesses.
Grid technologies, web services, J2EE, and clustering technologies are just scratching the surface.

The 2 cultures: suits and jeans

[Anonymous Coward]

The way a professor of mine explained it to me is that there are 2 kinds of people in the IT world: suits and jeans -- and never the 'twain shall meet.

At the business end of the spectrum, you have the MBAs and the like, and the more expensive the suit you wear, the more respect you get. Pick top-level executives from any company other than Google and a very few other technical companies, and you'll see what I mean. They will always wear expensive suits, and people who aspire to be in their position will dress likewise. Here are some examples of the look that this culture aspires to [google.com]. Searching for most of the names you'll find in Forbes magazine will come up with similar results.

At the technical end of the spectrum, you have hardcore techies who live, breath and sleep in the world of concepts and structures and mental things that the MBAs don't understand or care to understand. They're mostly extremely mental people, and they pay more attention to what's in their head than what's in the world around them. If they're successful (as determined by their peers), they are successful because of their skills, not because of what their peers think about their cloting, or because people are impressed with their $20,000 wardrobe and 7-series BMW. Here are some examples of a guy who epitomizes the jeans culture [google.com]. Search for similarly revered technical people, and you'll come up with similar results.

As my professor explained, know your audience, and dress accordingly! Suits don't respect you if you wear jeans, and jeans don't respect you if you wear a suit.

Re:Friendly

[SilverJets]

I found Google to be very closed when interviewing with them. They had gone to the trouble of setting up a tech phone interview for me at my convenience since we are in different time zones. At the end of the interview when the interviewer asked if I had any questions all I got back was "Sorry we don't talk about infrastructure" and "Sorry I can't answer that" when asking basic questions about what servers they run, how many, what OS, etc. Considering it was a Sys Admin job I was interviewing for I found it frustrating to not be able to find out what type of environment I was potentially going to be working in.