You are such an acute observer, sir. This is the most accurate description about the matter by someone not Chinese I ever read. For that you have my respect.
> but simple malloc/free are much faster and more predictable than what you see in GC'd languages
More predictable, very likely. Much faster, this is simply not true. E.g., quotes from an article by Brian Goetz[1]:
The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is
approximately 10 machine instructions, whereas the best performing
malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100
instructions per call. ... "Garbage collection will never be as efficient
as direct memory management." And, in a way, those statements are right
-- dynamic memory management is not as fast -- it's often considerably faster.
> allocation to the stack, something that effectively ceases to exist in GC'd languages.*
Not true, either. With escape analysis, Hotspot JVM can do stack allocation. The flag of doing escape analysis is actually turned on by default now.
That writeup is certainly interesting, mostly with regard to escape analysis, but it's entirely untrustworthy with regard to the comparison to malloc. First, it appears to base its assumptions about malloc implementations on a paper dating to 1993 (WTF?!), second is that it thinks "instructions" is a meaningful metric for judging performance.
> Maybe the big companies like Google and Facebook are approaching a new meaning of a “large codebase”.
If codebase is that large, language alone can't solve all the problems. Be it compiling time, testing time, or whatever problems large codebase may have. I guess that's exactly what Steve Yegge tried to say in his famous Platform Rant blog post.
Yeah, I started with TJoC, but it felt like watching a movie before reading the book: it's fun, but you miss many of the insights that went into producing the movie.
So I backed up, practiced some (koans, 4clojure, Euler), read Stuart Sierra's Programming Clojure and then read TJoC. Both excellent books, btw.
> Your comment is a case in point. Anyone familiar with your story (at Google and, as you know, there are many of us who are) knows how totally skewed your perception is.
Speak for yourself, would you? I'm myself a victim, unfortunately. I never even knew my Perf when I was with the company, only discovered it accidentally after I left. The process is very broken for me. Thanks @michaelochurch, I now know better about what had happened.
Generally yes, you can see your peer reviews. What you can't see is your calibration score. And your calibration drives all of your compensation. There have been folks with really good reading peer reviews who have had really low calibration scores because their manager, for one reason or another, gave them that score.
I agree that many cases are different but the HR process is broken at Google, and it happens to be broken in a way unique to how Google set things up, but the effect is the same at other companies where reviews are a beauty contest.
@anthonydchang No, I never received such emails. My manager and / or HR never bother. When I discovered this accidently after I left, I complained by submitting a ticket. But you know what, almost whole managements at that subsidiary (read: Google China) has been sacked. So nobody could care less about it. I must say working for Google is THE worst working experience for me.
Even without the emails, there are the links on the left in Perf that you can see your peer and manager reviews. Unless you're telling me Google China used a different Perf.
I'm sorry to hear that you feel your time at Google is the worst experience for you, but your story just doesn't make sense. How can you submit a ticket after you left? Were you in eng? Did you not see mchurch's delusional rants and all the people that came out trying to help him? If anything, the support, advice given to mchurch is exactly why Google is a pretty awesome place to work.
The only reason I visited my personal profile was to write weekly snippet. So no, I didn't pay attention to the links you mentioned if there were no Perf emails to remind me.
I submitted a ticket from outside as an alumnus. It is a fact. Credit to Google for setting this up. That being said, if there is anyone gets delusional, it is you.
I'm an engineer and used to work for Sun Microsystems. It was awesome. So I have pretty good idea about what it takes and what to expect working for a good silicon valley company in general, including Google. It just didn't apply to what happened to me in Google.
No, GP is right, your story seems odd. I'm not saying it's false, but it certainly isn't related to what mchurch is talking about. If you visited the perf website (which you have to do at least every year), then you saw the "Received feedback" link at the top of the page. If you were bothered by not knowing your performance results, you should have clicked that link.
Saying you didn't explore your personal profile or look at the perf website and then complaining that you never knew your performance scores is like saying you never visited your calendar page and being upset about not knowing your meeting schedule.
It sounds like you may have had issues with poor management, but the fact that you didn't know your performance scores has nothing to do with mchurch's fictional manager retaliation, nor is it common for managers to blackmail their reports with poor perf scores over differences of opinion the way he alleges.
1. Perf is different from your personal profile or snippets. Were you even at Google long enough for Perf?
2. "I didn't pay attention." there you go :)
Guys, it sounds like he worked for Google China. I don't know how tech works between different Google entities (as I don't/never have worked for Google), but its possible that Google China wasn't using the same system as Google US at the time edwardw was working for them.
It's possible, yes, but highly unlikely as he uses all the US terms. What is possible was that he was a contractor rather than employee, and then your compensation has nothing to do with your Google managers, it's up to your contracting company.
The tech exists, which is called fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But I concur in what olalonde says, average people simply don't care that much about privacy.
Hence why OP mentioned the need for a scifi novel and some court cases to create a market. I'm not sure that would work, it doesn't seem to have done so in other domains.
