Jeff Dean: belief

Transcript context

…I joined, this was like, end of 2000, and they had this thing: everybody gets a mentor. I knew nothing. I would just ask my mentor everything, and my mentor knew everything. It turned out my mentor was Jeff. It was not the case that everyone at Google knew everything. It was just the case that Jeff knew everything because he had basically written everything. You're very kind. I think as companies grow, you kind of go through these phases. When I joined, we were 25 people, 26 people, something like that. So you eventually you learned everyone's name, and even though we were growing, you kept track of all the people who were joining. At some point, you lose track of everyone's name in the company, but you still know everyone working on software engineering things. Then you lose track of all the names of people in the software engineering group, but you at least know all the different projects that everyone's working on. Then at some point, the company gets big enough that you get an email that Project Platypus is launching on Friday, and you're like, "What the heck is Project Platypus?" Usually it's a very good surprise. You're like, "Wow, Project Platypus!" I had no idea we were doing that.…

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