I just want to serve 5 terabytes.

Ha ha ha. Have you seen the Broccoli Man short? And that was a satire of what Google's infrastructure looked like in 2010 . ▶ this video

My other favorite internal internal meme from that era was the Broccoli Man video, "I just want to serve 5 Terabytes." ▶ this video

Broccoli Man! classic ▶ this video (2010) To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen

Have you ever watched the original? It most certainly did not involve real people talking ( ▶ this video ). In fact, the overtly robotic voices added to the humor of the original, IMO. It was lost in this translation.

It's way over my head but aware it already was quite intricate and frustrating [1] [1a] at times. Finding a good stable online file storage area is getting harder, especially the last few years where people have been caught out when fires or other catastrophes [2] occur. [1] ▶ this video [video - 2010] [1a] link *A more universal link to a mp4 (15 megs) or mkv (5 megs) download as per the original youtube link since imposed restrictions youtube likes to impose on some people from time to time. [2] link

This is probably the most accurate statement possible. “I just want to store 5TiB somewhere” “Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells” ▶ this video

A couple of things have struck me about Google as an outsider: - Learning that they had 100K+ employees - Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank - Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0] - Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills - They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue) In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future. Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory. (although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...) 0 - ▶ this video

Ridiculously low-quality documentation, a build and development system that puts the local Rube Goldberg competition winner to shame, constant churn, total deafness or willful ignoring of wishes of dev ... and so on have nothing to do with what happened 20 years ago. It's the classic "I would like to serve 5 terabytes"[0] Google problem. (Their engineering culture reeks of this. See the tools they have released. Angular, Bazel, Go, Kubernetes, etc. The last one escaped the usual decline of incompetence because the community showed up. Go has GOPATH. Even in a language designed for "simplicity" initially getting it set up had this roadblock.) And no doubt the roots of the problem are manifold, but it seems all stemming from ongoing management incompetence (creation of shareholder value[1] maaaybe excluded, though I am very curious what kind of inane metrics the Android SDK team is whipped to chase). [0] ▶ this video [1] link

Maybe fear killed engineering. Even in a decently managed company, I can see so many engineering effort gets stalled, compromised, bastardized, or killed. Like your manager asks you to get sign-offs from 10 different orgs. Like you want to do a POC, yet somehow an infra team demanded that you integrate with their system even though your targeted users didn't give a shit. Like you just want to submit a workflow to Temporal Cloud yet a product manager demands that you create an abstraction because he is afraid of X and Y. Like you just want to serve 5TB of data, and you got sucked into this: ▶ this video . I'm not sure how companies battle this kind of fear. It looks Amazon's Working Backwards, Netflix's Freedom and Responsibility, Uber's Let Builders Build more or less can counter such fear, but ultimately it's about finding the right people who have good sense of product and who strive to make progress.

millions sounds like a lot but it's like just 3 employees. To quote broccoli man, "i've forgotten how to count that low" [1]. [1]: ▶ this video

This video [0] was from 2010s, and seems like they had similar issues even back then. (never worked at Google) [0] ▶ this video

There are only so many TPUs available and they're kept at 100% utilization. Google has had complex "marketplaces" around company resources for years: ▶ this video It's a cultural value, like playing board games.