I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [22]
Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail, explained to me how that worked in practice. He recalled telling Urs about a problem he had been struggling to solve.
"Larry said we should put it all in memory."
"Yeah," Urs answered in his usual deadpan voice. "Larry has a lot of ideas. You should just keep doing what you're doing."
"That's when I realized," Paul told me, "that you have to be smart enough to not just do what Larry says, if it doesn't make sense in the present." As the man who had to keep Google's wheels on the tracks, Urs understood that better than anyone. His focus prevented the young company from being shunted down sidelines that led nowhere.
Urs's most significant accomplishment, however, was building the team that built Google. "Your greatest impact as an engineer comes through hiring someone who is as good as you or better," he exhorted everyone who would listen, "because over the next year, they double your productivity. There's nothing else you can do to double your productivity. Even if you're a genius, that's extremely unlikely to happen."
Silicon Valley was one huge inflating tech-boom bubble, and plenty of companies awarded BMW signing bonuses to any coder who could fog a mirror. It was Urs's insistence on only hiring engineers at least as qualified as those already at the company that set him apart. "If you have very good people, it gives you a safety net," he believed. "If there's something wrong, they self-correct. You don't have to tell them, 'Hey, pay attention to this.' They feel ownership and fix it before you even knew it was broken."
Two such hires were Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. If Urs was Google's architect, Jeff and Sanjay were the master carpenters who raised the roof beams and pounded the nails that held together the load-bearing walls. Wherever problems needed to be solved, "JeffnSanjay" were there*—from devising the Google file system to developing advertising technology, from accelerating machine translation to building breakthrough tools like MapReduce.†
Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding. It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school.
Tall, gaunt, and a tad taciturn, with angular features that bring to mind Gary Cooper, Jeff had just left the research center at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to start a new job with a promising dot-com when Urs called him in June 1999.
"I wasn't really thinking that he'd change jobs after just three months," said Urs, "but what he said was, 'It's good timing, because I'm bored. I've solved all the technical problems there are to solve at this company, so I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake.'"
Jeff couldn't wait to engage the challenges at Google. He showed up weeks before his official start date, before he'd even left the other company, and wrote code without being on the payroll because he "wanted to hit the ground running."
Two dozen former DEC researchers would follow Jeff to Google. Many, including Sanjay, were encouraged by the knowledge that Jeff was already there. Mindful of Urs's admonition to hire great people, Jeff went after them with every means at his disposal, including placing recruiting ads on Google that appeared whenever someone searched for obscure coding-related keywords like "TLB shootdown" or "lock free synchronization." (After engineer Paul Haahr joined Google, he told Jeff, "Any company that advertises on 'lock free synchronization' is good enough for me.")
While many of those who came from DEC took on major roles—for example, Monika Henzinger became