2/17/2017 Whatteamsareconsidered'elite'atGoogle?

Quora

AskorSearchQuora AskQuestion Read Answer Notifications Mohamad

SoftwareEngineeringatGoogle TeamsandTeamwork +2
RelatedQuestions
What teams are considered "elite" at Google?
Inotherwords,whichteamsareconsideredthesmartest,orworkonthemostdifficult Isthesearchdepartmentstillconsideredtobean
elitedepartmentinGoogle?
tasks?
Whatteamsareconsidered"elite"atApple?
Answer Request Follow 120 Comment Share 4 Downvote
Whataresomeexamplesofelitehighperforming
teams?
PromotedbyResourceGuru
IsthereadifferenceinthewaythatGooglemanages
ResourceGuruisthefast,simplewaytoscheduleyourteam. theworkersontheGoogle+teamfromtheYouTube
Saygoodbyetoschedulingwithspreadsheets,andgainfullprojectvisibilityonaclever team,Mapsteam,Searchteam,ect.?
calendar.
WhicharethehappiestteamsatGoogle?
LearnMoreatresourceguruapp.com
WholeadstheGoogleNowteam?

4Answers TeamsandTeamwork:Whatnonfictionalduosare
consideredlegendary?

Terry Lambert, former Sr. Software Engineer at Google (2012-2013) IsGoogleCloudPlatformteamconsideredelite

WrittenMar27,2016FeaturedinYahooUpvotedbyPiyushKhemka,workedatGoogle insideGoogle?
andEricJang,workedatGoogle
Google:HowarecandidatestoJeffDean'steam
The sexy high impact stu everyone wants to work on
interviewed?

Anything to do with Google X. That's where people want to go, to work on cool stu HowhardisittochangeteamsinGoogle?
that could have a big impact on the future. If you want to work on space elevators --
MoreRelatedQuestions
this is where you work.

Anything to do with Google ATAP (Advanced Technologies and Projects). It's QuestionStats
basically a privatized DARPA. Want a smartwatch that can recognize what you are
typing? With both hands? Here. 120Followers
336,771Views
Deep learning and articial intelligence (think AlphaGo).
LastAskedNov13

The self driving cars; a lot of people want to work on a cutting edge technology that Edits

looks like it might be widely deployed.

The Google streetview technology; it's deployed, used, has lots of interesting image
processing challenged, and you get to do things like run robots around the Louvre,
capturing absurdly detailed images of masterpiece artwork.

The middle of the road stu that's never going to go anywhere

There's a lot of this. It's the majority of what people do, in fact; consider it the middle
of the bell curve.

Mostly: you get paid to work on Open Source, and if you are lucky, it integrates well
enough together to be a product, but really: Google cant productize to save its life.
Maybe Sundar can x this, maybe he can't. The people I knew who were good at it are
all gone from Google.

Google Reader? Everyone bitches about it dying, but really, there was no way to
monetize it once people started to build their own clients and block ads, and everyone
who was working on it wandered away to more interesting things after it was
working. It actually died from neglect: the back end infrastructure changed, and so it
couldn't run unless someone stepped up and ported it to the new back end. I'm pretty
sure they'd give you the source code (I know someone outside Google they oered it
to), but the protocol was at the wrong level: you're going to nd it impossible to
monetize too.

This is basically some of the aimless stu that happens when you are spending a lot of
money, and there's no way for middle management to force people to work on hard
stu (like productization: it's hard, and someone has to own the "it works" bit).

It's great fun to work on, if you only care about making money, getting perks, and
having a blast working on stu you'd probably work on in your free time, if you
weren't at Google.

The stu that earns Google the money that it spends on the other stu

https://www.quora.com/WhatteamsareconsideredeliteatGoogle 1/3
2/17/2017 Whatteamsareconsidered'elite'atGoogle?Quora
This stu is, unfortunately, unsexy as all hell. Like seriously unsexy. I'd say that this
AskorSearchQuora AskQuestion Read Answer Notifications Mohamad
stu is absolutely the hardest to work on. There are some really smart people here,
but unless you are one of the people setting direction, these are usually not the
smartest people. The smartest people have gured out how to get into X and ATAP.

These are the AdWords people.

They are the Search people.

They are the Search Quality people.

The problem is that it's an absolute pain in the ass to work on one of these teams,
because you CAN'T make mistake, because if you do, everyone on the globe can no
longer search for crap. Or everyone gets the same ad for pet deodorizers.

Not being able to make a mistake makes this astonishingly meticulous work, and you
are really pretty luck if you check in 10 lines of code, and that ends up going to a test
cluster so that a tiny, tiny fraction of people who do searches end up getting your
code.

I know one guy who spent a month from the idea to the implementation of going
from sponsored results being in a (very slightly) yellow box to a (very slightly) more
yellow box.

I can't imagine what the person who went from the boxes to the little yellow [Ad]
rectangle to the left of the link went through. It must have been hell.

OK, now I have to LOL!

This is exactly about the amount of time and level of detail I had to go through at
Novell/USG (the former USL) to push through a single pointer indirection change in
SVR4.2 in the proc struct to share address spaces between processes, back before
System V UNIX supported threads (in fact, it was an essential step to supporting
threads: single address space, shared per process open le, everything else associated
with a thread context separate).

So I guess some people are cut out for this work!

So it's kind of an axis, where you have the really smart people who get lucky on one
end, nearly everyone else in the middle, and the really smart people with obsessive
compulsive disorder (even if it's only a professional aectation) on the other end.
97.4kViewsViewUpvotes

Upvote 486 Downvote Comments 6+

Osman Ahmed Osman, worked at Google

UpdatedMay24,2016UpvotedbyNikhilGarg,EngineeringManageratQuoraandHieu
Pham,GoogleBrainResident

There are a lot of awesome teams at Google, but I think the Search Quality team
always had a special kind of respect. Search is obviously core to Google's business,
and getting search quality right is an incredibly dicult problem. When you search
and Google tells you there were X million results, it's the Search Quality team that set
the rules that determined the rst ten results you actually see.

Also, although Google tends to be an open and transparent company internally,

search quality and ranking is one of those areas where there is a high need for
condentiality, for all the obvious reasons you can imagine.

Search quality is Google's secret sauce.

230kViewsViewUpvotes

Upvote 4.9k Downvote Comments 6+

Joel Johnson, former Software Engineer at Google (2010)

WrittenMar27,2016UpvotedbyTerryLambert,formerSr.SoftwareEngineeratGoogle
(20122013)andOsmanAhmedOsman,workedatGoogle

Search and machine learning. It would be easy to believe AdWords teams are elite,
but they are mostly gridlocked, ridden with politics, and in maintenance mode. That

https://www.quora.com/WhatteamsareconsideredeliteatGoogle 2/3
2/17/2017 Whatteamsareconsidered'elite'atGoogle?Quora
is, maybe they were elite 10-15 years ago, but if you look at the AdWords interface, it's
AskorSearchQuora AskQuestion Read Answer Notifications Mohamad
easy to see that's far from the case now.
12.8kViewsViewUpvotes

Upvote 35 Downvote Comment 1

Pranav Krishnan, Theoretical Physicist in awe with Machine learning.

WrittenMar27,2016UpvotedbyHieuPham,GoogleBrainResidentandOsmanAhmed
Osman,workedatGoogle

Google Brain

The Google Brain group is led by Je Dean, whom many at Google consider as the
smartest person at the company. The Google Brain deep-learning research project has
played a decisive role in the implementation of the deep learning concept across
many of the companys products such as search, to better optimize the search
algorithm. The deep learning concept makes use of an articial neural network, built
to mimic the human brain.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that "We have lots of searches, lots of ads, lots
of customers, lots of data centers, we have lots of people using Google compute, we
have lots of people using our security software, over and over again. Whenever you
have a large number of people using something, we can probably use machine
intelligence to make it more ecient by watching and training against the signal."

Articial Intelligence is one of the most challenging elds to work in, and Google
Brain is one of the best teams in AI along with Facebook's AI research (FAIR) team.

A hard problem along with the most skilled employees, make Google Brain the 'crme
de la crme' of all groups in Google.
5.1kViewsViewUpvotes

Upvote 21 Downvote Comment

TopStoriesfromYourFeed

FromYourQuoraDigest FromYourQuoraDigest FromYourQuoraDigest

How do I print 1 to 100 without a How did we lose the technology What would have happened if
loop or recursion? to go to the Moon? the Soviet Union had joined
Ryan Lam, I do incredibly stupid Erdenebadrakh Chinguun, studied forces with Nazi Germany in
things with code at Sant School WW2?
UpdatedMonUpvotedbyStevende Updated13hago
James MacKinnon, World War 2
Rooij,PhDintheoreticalcomputerscience
The Saturn V cant be built again not bu and extensive reader on the
EDIT: To stop the never-ending ow of because of cost or no more factories, but subject
people who keep whining about how all of WrittenJan24
because it was designed to work with 70s
these have conceptual loops, if thats all It would be a
tech. We did the moon landing with a
you have to say, then yeah yeah we get it, disaster. If the
computer with 64KBs of memory! Your
whatever. I interpreted the que... U.S.S.R entered the
phone...
war against the
Allies, it would
have been a
ReadInFeed ReadInFeed ReadInFeed
catastrophe. In World War 2, the Nazis had

https://www.quora.com/WhatteamsareconsideredeliteatGoogle 3/3