Re:Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Eng...
by jeremysalwen on Sunday September 08, 2019 @02:25PM
(#20912344)
Hmm, I think you interpreted my comment about "making a small change to shared components" differently than I meant it.
I am guessing that your changes did not change the semantic behavior of other people's code. e.g. you were replacing one hash-map implementation with a more efficient one. That's something where obviously Google's tools do cancel out the inherent inefficiency of large organizations/code bases.
My point was that Google has the level of efficiency of a small organization, despite being a large organization. That the default for big organizations is to "just suck" as you described, makes this remarkable, but I never felt like this resulted in a superhuman level of productivity that you might expect considering how advanced the tools are.
I am guessing that your changes did not change the semantic behavior of other people's code. e.g. you were replacing one hash-map implementation with a more efficient one. That's something where obviously Google's tools do cancel out the inherent inefficiency of large organizations/code bases.
My point was that Google has the level of efficiency of a small organization, despite being a large organization. That the default for big organizations is to "just suck" as you described, makes this remarkable, but I never felt like this resulted in a superhuman level of productivity that you might expect considering how advanced the tools are.