I just want to serve 5 terabytes.

I am a Xoogler. The source document/presentation ("Coordination Headwinds") and idea are many years old, and from what I recall were not aimed to be critical of the company and its organization, rather to give its employee readers a feeling of solace and understanding for why getting seemingly small things done can feel overly hard and slow… a less humorous, and less SWE-specific version of "Broccoliman" if you will. Refer to the red panda that merely wants to serve 5TB of data. - ▶ this video - [link] I’ll try to continue using the organism-metaphor in my commentary. While the “slime mold” story provides a convenient and charitable explanation of Google's bureaucracy and dysfunctions, another explanation is: - As an organism, Google's executive decision-making functions are severely impaired by lack of accurate information, dysfunction of its middle-management “organs” or tiers, and impedance mismatches arising from genetic encodings or mental models associated with the slime-mold idea. - Despite being on a mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is far less successful at doing this with its own information. These characteristics are not unique to Google, but some of Google’s cultural history makes this a particularly challenging problem. It may be convenient to think of Google as a slime-mold organism, and in an individual contributor’s day-to-day engineering activities it may very well be, but as a corporation it is no

in “Internal document explains why Google has become slow and bureaucratic” · View on HN

Yeah, when I was there I saw plenty of <1% optimizations saving REDACTED gobs of money, and people were rewarded for it. I don't think it's applicable to most teams though. Imagine a foo/bar/widget app that only serves 20B people (obvious exaggeration to illustrate the point) and is only necessary up to a few hundred times per day. You can handle that sort of traffic on a laptop on my home router and still have enough hootzpah left to stream netflix. I mean, you are Google, and you need to do something better than that [0], but the hardware for your project is going to be negligible compared to other concerns unless you're doing FHE or video transcoding or something extraordinarily expensive. Walk that backward to, how many teams have 20B users or are doing extraordinarily expensive things? I don't have any clue, but when you look at public examples of cheap things that never got much traction and probably had a suite of engineers [1], I'd imagine it's not everyone in any case. You're probably mostly looking at people with enough seniority to be able to choose to work on core code affecting most services. [0] ▶ this video [1] [link]

in “I/O is no longer the bottleneck” · View on HN

> At a different (unnamed) FAANG I'm guessing Google, on the basis of the recently published (to the public) "I just want to serve 5TB"[1] video. If it isn't Google, then the broccoli man video is still a cogent reminder that unyielding multi-region rigor comes with costs. 1. ▶ this video

in “AWS us-east-1 outage” · View on HN

Regarding the phrase "I don't know how to count that low", here's the video where it originated. Frankly I'm astonished this hasn't been shared before, and I hope I don't get in trouble for posting it (it's like 11 years old, surely nobody cares at this point, right?) ▶ this video

in “I don’t know how to count that low” · View on HN

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.

in “Broccoli Man, Remastered” · View on HN

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]

in “Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?” · View on HN

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

in “The Jeff Dean Facts” · View on HN

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

in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration” · View on HN

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

in “Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google” · View on HN

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

in “Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?” · View on HN

You might have had 20 years of experience building products that don't need to scale for millions of concurrent users, if you consider all "purely internal architectural changes" to be lower priority than the customer facing work just because it's purely internal. And the Google guy might have tried to spend time scaling a product that will have five concurrent users, because "this is Google" ( ▶ this video ). It's all about perspective, and CEO thought the other perspective was more valuable.

in “Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet” · View on HN

The first time I heard about Monarch was in discussions about the hilarious "I just want to serve 5 terabytes" video[0]. [0]: ▶ this video

in “Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database” · View on HN

You mean like: [link] This is common in the research PA. People don't want to deal with broccoli man [1]. [1] ▶ this video

in “Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model” · View on HN

> The worst is, of course, GCL/borgcfg, the (turing complete) configuration language for Google's internal job scheduling software. “Noone has borgmon readability.” — Broccoli Man ( ▶ this video )

in “The Curse of NixOS” · View on HN