Jeremy Zawodny

> I very much doubt that many of the people (broadly) deciding which products to support and which to drop were hired via a new-grad-like interview process.

I'm confused as to why you doubt that. Google's been around for almost 20 years. Their interviewing process has been around since at least 2003.[1] It's 100% possible that somebody was hired, ended up in higher management, and graduated to making driving decisions (at least over a particular area) in that time, unless your suggestion is that nobody who enters as a new grad ever stays long enough to get to that level, which at Google (vs other SV companies) seems unlikely.

[1] http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000616.html

> For things like moonshots/other bets, the "build something awesome but don't monetize it" makes a lot of sense, since the entire point of that division seems to be "build something awesome and see if it is sustainable too". More often than not, unfortunately, the answer is no.

It does make sense, it's more the messaging around those kinds of projects that tends to get lost. You end up in situations where thousands or sometimes millions of users are relying on a "beta" product, which has no monetization strategy, and then gets scrapped. It's a pattern that's still unpleasant for end users and not great for Google's reputation.

> If we presuppose that there is this dichotomy in people and it affect google's motives and goals as a company, then this would influence the tech hiring practices to…

For the life of me, I can't understand why craigslist has had this mentality. I basically have to chalk it up to Craig being stubborn. He was burned by ebay grabbing 20%, he hasn't changed the design ever, and may constantly live in fear of being co-opted by the man. But like it or not, Craigslist is the man. And when your users go out of their way to create pieces of software that actually improve the experience for your users (like letting me sort through the pile of duplicate, spam, and misleading listings) don't shut them down. Open up and help them. Craigslist lets people post their information for free in many cases, but for some strange reason won't let people take information out.

I had hoped that the culture might become more developer friendly after Jeremy Zawodny (formerly at Yahoo) joined up. Zawodny even wrote an article about how all this terrific data was available via RSS, but there was no good way to piece it together: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008513.html

Craig is a programmer and he comes across as a normal, humble sort of guy. We like him and we like his service. I don't understand his obsession with keeping craigslist a) locked in the dark ages for functionality and b) not letting anyone build something that adds useful features. It really starts to make you think. Is he just strange or (if you don't give him the benefit of the doubt like I do) evil?

I've worked a bit with Symfony and I've worked a lot with heavily loaded LAMP deployments. Symfony/Propel (and I hear Drupal/Propel) tends to generate a whole lot of select statements when you're allowing it to generate scaffolding code.. So this leaves you with a couple options:

i) re-factor auto-gen code when it becomes a problem. A good code profiler will really help you find these bottlenecks but you can also watch 'show processlist' from a mysql CLI to see slow queries or table locking issues if you're using MyISAM.

ii) Memcache - memcache caches query results and keeps the most heavily requested results cached, lets less heavily requested data fade (it will go back to the database to get it rather than keep a copy of the result around.) obviously if you're dealing with a 'real time' application caching may not be of huge benefit.

Jeremy Zawodny has a pretty good article here:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000173.html

About setting your wait timeouts and connection limits, etc. It's good stuff and it's something I see overlooked very often. The default mysql config isn't necessarily a your friend when it comes to scaling.

Other points above relating to 'spindle speed' when it comes to hard drive performance etc, also apply. One other good rule of thumb is that MySQL loves RAM. Add RAM and you generally add performance.

Hope that helps. :)

I've seen this "limitation" mentioned in various online forums, such as the following.

"Mac OS X interface and ergonomy is (as said by apple) not 'compatible' with the focus-follow mouse mode. Why ? Because a single application interface is split into lots of different elements. For exemple, you use an application like photoshop or word, you'll have different panels floating around the main window. With sloppy focus mode enabled, with an application below, you would'nt be able to reach them. And how should they consider the desktop, which is, finally, just a 'root' window managed by the Finder..."[1]

Here are some more.

"Sadly, it seems that for the time being there is no good way to do this in OS X."[2]

"The fundamental problem with sloppy focus on the Mac is that the menu bar is always associated with the currently focused application; if you had sloppy focus, accessing the menu bar for a specific application would be supremely difficult."[2]

[1] - http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000149.html#comment-14550

[2] - http://superuser.com/questions/27306/focus-follows-mouse-or-sloppy-focus-on-mac-os-x

The moment when Google turned to the dark side was in 2005-2006, when they stopped sponsoring the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" and started sponsoring SEO conventions.

"There's going to be a Web Spam Squashing Summit next week: Thursday, Feb 24th. (2005). Technorati is organizing the event (thanks guys!) and we're hosting it on-site at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. The main goal to get the tool makers in a room together to talk about web spam, share info, and brainstorm. So far AOL, Google, MSG, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo are on board. I hope we'll also have representation from Feedster, WordPress (hi Matt), and Ask Jeeves and/or Bloglines too."[1]

The next year, in 2006, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[2]

"The search advertising market – a tremendous credit to you and to the organization that built this conference..."

And that's when Google turned evil. From trying to stop search spam, to promoting it.

[1] http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004256.html

[2] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html

I have three words for you, my friend: "electric space heaters". :)

I won't dwell on the fact that laptops are ergonomically evil and will eventually send you to the doctor with one form of RSI or another. If you don't already understand this, it will be very hard to convince you.

Instead I'll point out that your productivity is proportional to how much monitor you've got. Researchers have measured this [1][2], hackers [3] and techies [4] have testified to this, and Apple has sold a lot of incredibly expensive 30-inch displays because of this. Why are you killing your own productivity in order to save the cost of running an electric space heater? Is it the coffee? Don't get hooked on the coffee!

[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=433

[3] http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005541.html

[4] http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/05/31/dual-monitor-display-increases-productivity/