The Pragmatic Engineer
00:04:20 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:04:20] S0: And then you... After high school, it was kind of obvious you went to college for it? [00:04:25] S1: Yeah. So I went to Harvey Mudd, which is a great school with a mix of, you know, tech and liberal arts education, the kind of place that'll teach you to build weapons and teach you how not to use them, that sort of thing. And then I met my wife there, and she was a little bit more junior than I was, so I didn't wanna move away. She was still in school. So I did my master's at UC Riverside, actually in computer science education. Alrighty. I did a kind of weird... I had a very strange graduate experience. But, yeah, I spent four years at Riverside doing a PhD in CS ed, kind of applied AI educational data mining, science education. So some of the earliest conferences on CS ed research, I have published there. And my my adviser was the department chair. He never generally ran grad students. Like, the research area was not his focus, but he was constantly the chair. He was this, like, charming, you know, social political sort of guy that knew all the stories. And so my graduate work was a lot of learn all of the stories of how we got here and teach all of the classes whenever there was a hole in the [00:05:42] S0: Yeah. And and we'll we'll we'll keep coming back to probably this, like, this education computer science thing throughout this thing. So... Well, guess we... We've been taught before, so I know. But let's let's jump next. So, like, you you you now graduated from college. You were looking for a job. Yep. What what did you find?
00:05:42 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:05:42] S0: Yeah. And and we'll we'll we'll keep coming back to probably this, like, this education computer science thing throughout this thing. So... Well, guess we... We've been taught before, so I know. But let's let's jump next. So, like, you you you now graduated from college. You were looking for a job. Yep. What what did you find? [00:06:01] S1: So first, I did a sort of consulting group. Again, two body problem. My wife went to grad school in San Diego. I did not get a professorship after my PhD. So I did this consulting stuff. I was at a small startup consulting group, about 30, 50 people. Mostly, I worked for... Indirectly for DIRECTV during the embedded system stuff on set top boxes. Mhmm. And then after four years of that, we were done with grad schools. We were done with all of that. I took the offer to do Google interview, got the offer, decided not to go to the Bay Area, and they moved us to New York. So we've been here ever since. [00:06:42] S0: And this is when Google was opening an office here in [00:06:44] S1: New The office was already open and reasonably big. This was 2010. So I think there were a few thousand people there.
00:06:44 · Titus Winters, Gergely Orosz
[00:06:44] S1: New The office was already open and reasonably big. This was 2010. So I think there were a few thousand people there. [00:06:51] S0: And then in in 2010, so Google was founded in in '98. They went public in 2004. I I remember that they started to really accumulate a global brand as like, wow, Google is the place to work at around like 2005 to 2010. So right around when you were applying it, it was actually one of the hardest places to get into. A bit like today, Anthropic or last year OpenAI or the, you know, like in in the mid mid two thousand tens Uber. Yeah. How did you find the interview experience and and getting an offer? Because it it must have been pretty competitive at that point. [00:07:23] S1: It was competitive. I was a little surprised that they gave me the offer. I didn't... I I felt like I didn't do that great. I remember for some stupid reason, I really, really didn't wanna spend a bunch of, like, precious vacation days, so I flew up from San Diego the morning of instead of sensibly, like [00:07:41] S0: And they they would have paid for the hotel and everything. Yeah.
00:07:41 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:07:41] S0: And they they would have paid for the hotel and everything. Yeah. [00:07:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I just didn't want... Like, I don't know. I'm an anxious person. I had... I like my habits and routines and stuff. Getting up at five for a big interview is not a good plan, folks. Hot tip. So there are a couple things. Like, I remember one interview was like a relatively simple, like, clock math sort of thing. It was technically camera angles on a Mars rover or something. And there was a point in there where was like, I'm tired in having interview brain, and this is just basic math. So here's a function that has the right inputs and outputs. And if I wasn't stupid this morning, that would work. And I just did it all in terms of that. And I think my interviewer actually really liked that approach of like, yeah, this is not the important part. Like, let's just talk. And so, yeah, eventually, they they gave me the offer and, yeah, moved to New York and [00:08:32] S0: started up. And when we joined, you got you got the nuclear hat. [00:08:35] S1: Uh-huh. Yep. Absolutely. It was [00:08:38] S0: And so what did you work on at Google when when you joined? [00:08:41] S1: So briefly, I was on... And, like, I I don't think that Google had the best placement for new hires necessarily. [00:08:49] S0: Onboarding process at least a.
00:08:49 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:08:49] S0: Onboarding process at least a. [00:08:51] S1: That was a little rough because, like I said, the things that I'm interested in are, like, developer efficiency, problem solve. Like, I have a background in networks. I have a background in, like, API design, those sorts of things. They said, oh, you know networks. So let's put you on this team that monitors the amount of traffic and where that is crossing the edge of the Google network, which is actually a databases problem with networks as the topic of all of the data that you're doing. I'm like, I don't know anything about databases. That was never my thing. That wasn't a great fit. And then almost immediately after that, like two or But I I wanna push a [00:09:32] S0: little bit back here already. It's like, come on. Like, you're you're joining Google, you have like, what like... You you had college, you had Yeah. Four or five years of experience. When like you joined a company, especially like a hot company, they said like, alright, do x and you're like, I'm not really there. Like, would you not wanna say like, let let me just go deep into this to see why the... What's important for the business? I am I am pushing back on you Yeah. [00:09:57] S1: Please do. Always. I did what I could to learn, you know, from that team for sure. There was a little, like, interpersonal tension in some of those things. [00:10:06] S0: Okay. So it already started a bit like that. Yeah. This nagging feeling.
00:10:06 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:10:06] S0: Okay. So it already started a bit like that. Yeah. This nagging feeling. [00:10:09] S1: Yeah. Like, it was just like, this wasn't quite right. And then there was a, like, email that went out to all the engineers in New York saying like, hey. We're thinking about spinning up a new team that handles all of the old, like, c plus plus nuts and bolts infrastructure code that was written by people whose employee IDs are, like, two digits. They have more important things to do than to handle, like, patch requests for all of those, you know, components. So we would like people to maintain that. And me and, I don't know, nine or 10 other people, like, raised their hands, and I was the only person that showed up to, like, the second meeting. So I just kinda got onto that team. [00:10:49] S0: Oh oh, I get it. So so, basically, I think the context is just important because I think, you know, folks here, oh, I'm joining this team. Like, I didn't really like the the first thing. I think the difference... The context that was missing is, like, first of all, Google was growing really quickly. New teams were starting up left and right. And also like moving teams was kind of fine. Right? And and you are more looking for like, alright, like you knew that this team both for the... What they were doing and also sometimes there's not a great people fit. It would probably not be the one where you're gonna be staying for many years. [00:11:19] S1: Yeah.