Benjamin Staffin
1 HN recommender · recommended in 16 months, 2021–2026
3:33 · 225K views · Nov 2, 2021
A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.
Used as a shorthand joke for Google-scale bureaucracy and the difficulty of simple tasks at large companies.
20 comments from Hacker News
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
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
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]
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]