I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [46]
Ben Gomes praised Sanjay's code and his systematic approach to growing the code base: "It set a tone for the rest of the code that was written." But he joked that Sanjay maintained unreasonable standards.
"He couldn't stand the fact that I didn't use white space properly. At a code review, he'd put his cursor below the end of everything and say, 'There's white space there. Why is there white space there?'"
Sanjay laughed when I asked him about that.
"I just did it a little bit to wind Ben up. I wanted to be able to come back to it in a couple of years, having basically forgotten everything we were thinking about when we wrote it, and still understand it. If all this bad formatting is getting in the way, it's something to fix."
Because Urs promoted team engineering to break complex problems into solvable pieces, code reviews were essential to ensure the pieces would fit together when reassembled. The system gave engineers independence but kept them from wandering too far from the standards unifying the codebase.
"A good team is ultimately what makes or breaks the problem," Urs explained years later. "If the team isn't the right one, they make little mistakes that erode the solution and in the end, you don't know what mistake you made, but it doesn't work. You need the control every day, every week. A new person will make little tiny judgment calls and not realize the cumulative effect. So after a few months you have actually destroyed the idea while you made no recognizable mistake. It was a sequence of small things."
A Day in the Life
Engineering had its discipline and routines—I had mine.
I began arriving earlier. Much earlier.
I'd tiptoe out of the house before six, start my car, and pull out of the driveway without turning on the headlights. Our bedroom faced the street, our blinds were broken, and Kristen was not a morning person. When I hit Highway 85, I'd crank up the heat and the radio and roll down the windows. By the time I arrived at the darkened Googleplex I was fully awake. I'd pull into the spot closest to the door and turn on my brights to see if the neighborhood skunk had camped out on the front steps. My first run-in with him had scared the crap out of me. I'd turn on the office lights and the copy machines before heading to the locker room.
Google's building stood adjacent to a wetlands preserve on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Jogging trails lined with white, yellow, purple, and pink wildflowers stretched for miles north and south, from the blimp hangars at Moffett Field along a jetty and over small hillocks to the Palo Alto airport. Hawks floated overhead and herons waded through the ponds. Raccoons, rabbits, and wildlife-watching retirees shared the dirt paths with swarms of gnats and a powerful ebb-tide aroma. I'd stretch against the front steps, start my DiscMan, and trudge slowly across the asphalt toward the Bay.
By eight a.m., I could run a couple of miles, have a sauna, shower, read the paper, eat a bowl of cereal, and still be practically alone in the building as I began cleaning out the barnacles that had attached themselves to my inbox overnight. Having unscrewed the fluorescent bulbs above my desk, I used the warmer glow of my desk lamp for illumination until the sun was high enough to come tripping through the windows. I'd plug in my headphones; crank up my homegrown hash of Yo Yo Ma, Otis Spann, and Ozomatli; and begin banging keys in a state of complete Zen-like absorption.
It felt good to be alive.
The euphoria usually