David Bremner dbremner

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

Your class can be no longer than 100 lines of code.
Your methods can be no longer than five lines of code.
You can pass no more than four parameters and you can’t just make it one big hash.
When a call comes into your Rails controller, you can only instantiate one object to do whatever it is that needs to be done. And your view can only know about one instance variable.

You can break these rules if you can talk your pair into agreeing with you.

	namespace SHOpenFolderAndSelectItems
	{
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.IO;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;
	using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
	using System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes;

	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;
	using System.Data.SqlClient;
	using System.Reflection.Emit;
	using System.Collections.Concurrent;
	using System.Data;
	using System.Reflection;

	class PngIconConverter
	{
	/* input image with width = height is suggested to get the best result */
	/* png support in icon was introduced in Windows Vista */
	public static bool Convert(System.IO.Stream input_stream, System.IO.Stream output_stream, int size, bool keep_aspect_ratio = false)
	{
	System.Drawing.Bitmap input_bit = (System.Drawing.Bitmap)System.Drawing.Bitmap.FromStream(input_stream);
	if (input_bit != null)
	{
	int width, height;

	// float->half variants.
	// by Fabian "ryg" Giesen.
	//
	// I hereby place this code in the public domain, as per the terms of the
	// CC0 license:
	//
	// https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
	//
	// float_to_half_full: This is basically the ISPC stdlib code, except
	// I preserve the sign of NaNs (any good reason not to?)

	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.IO;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;

	namespace SuffixTreeAlgorithm
	{
	public class SuffixTree
	{

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	#import <pthread.h>
	#import <mach/thread_act.h>

	// These two functions are declared in mach/thread_policy.h, but are commented out.
	// They are documented here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Performance/RN-AffinityAPI/_index.html
	kern_return_t thread_policy_set(
	thread_t thread,
	thread_policy_flavor_t flavor,
	thread_policy_t policy_info,
	mach_msg_type_number_t count);

	case class ListFoldRightBenchmark() extends SimpleScalaBenchmark {
	import scala.collection.mutable.ArrayStack

	@Param(Array("0", "1", "2", "3", "5", "10", "100", "500", "1000", "2000"))
	val length: Int = 0

	var list: List[Int] = _

	override def setUp() {
	// set up all your benchmark data here