On the 25th anniversary of joining Google, Jeff Dean opens up memories: moving workstations 16 times and making coffee with him.

Now, Jeff Dean has become the head of Google AI, and Google has also moved from a small office space to the "Bay View" campus of its California headquarters.

Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean enters his 25th year at the tech giant.

In August 1999, Jeff Dean joined Google as early employee No. 20. He co-founded the Google Brain team in 2011 to focus on advances in intelligent machines. Since then, his focus has shifted to research, systems, and applications in AI and ML, and he has led the direction of the broader AI/ML and computer science research communities.

In December 2020, Jeff Dean received the 2021 IEEE von Neumann Award in recognition of his contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems and artificial intelligence systems. In April 2023, Google announced that it would merge its Google Brain and DeepMind to form Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean serves as the department's chief scientist.

Today, in order to celebrate his 25th anniversary of joining Google, Jeff Dean tweeted to recall some stories from the early days of Google (stated in the first person).

25 years ago today, I officially joined a small search engine company in a small space above what is now a T-Mobile store in downtown Palo Alto. Since then, I've had the privilege of working with amazing colleagues and building software used by billions of people around the world.

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999, just one year after Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google (September 1998). It can be said that Jeff Dean is a veteran of Google. figure.

Thank you very much to all current and former colleagues. With everyone’s help and mutual help, Google can grow into what it is today. The first office I stayed in looked like this:

The following is the current office building. This is already my 16th office location at Google. It can be said that the number of times I have moved workspaces exceeds 98.88% of Google’s staff.

The company has an interesting website where you can check what percentage of employees in the company joined the company later than you. Now my score has reached five 9s (99.999%), but our engineering team is also an old employee, and everyone’s scores are infinite 9s.

Next, Jeff Dean shared some interesting stories that no one knows.

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In the early days of Google, when we were all working at Building Zero, Lucas Pereira maintained a "crayon chart". This chart shows the number of queries Google receives and is updated daily.

As Google grows, this chart gradually shrinks, starting with 10x, then 2x, 5x,…. People add different "milestones" to the chart (such as Google starting to provide services for Go2net, etc.). Early employees will also mark their joining time on this table. For example, the red arrow marked August 9th was written by me. You must know that the "crayon charts" in these pictures were originally posted on the wall and were ten meters long.

In Building Zero, we installed high-end Japanese Toto smart toilets, and each compartment was equipped with an infrared remote control to control functions. It was found that reflective paint on the toilet ceiling caused infrared signals to reflect, causing toilets in other stalls to be controlled at inappropriate moments.

Soon after, we switched to installing only one remote-controlled toilet per cubicle, a practice that probably continues in every Google building.

Jeff Dean Reminiscing about the past has resonated and reminisced with many people.

Some people say that it was thanks to the undeveloped search engine (Google) that I met my wife from the other side of the world 20 years ago.

Someone also recalled the first time they met Jeff Dean at the 2015 NeurIPS conference. He was so approachable and he is still so approachable now. Congratulations to Jeff Dean for such great results at this "small" search engine company.

When asked how you transitioned from compiler research to early work at Google? Jeff Dean said that before joining Google, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory (WRL), which is only two blocks away from the DEC Systems Research Center (SRC) laboratory.

AltaVista (mainly web page full-text search, providing category directory search) is jointly designed and created by DEC WRL and DEC SRC. When he joined DEC, some colleagues had built a web graph from data scraped by AltaVista. Then he and Monika Henzinger, the former director of research at Google, began to study how to use the web graph structure to find relevant pages in the web. Since compiler algorithms are often tied to various types of graphs, this is not as big a leap as it may seem (web-based information retrieval is just starting to exploit web graph structures in various ways, such as PageRank, etc.).

Plus, Jeff Dean shares which office building has had the best coffee for 25 years. He has fond memories of the B43, rushing to get coffee with a group of people every morning (if you didn’t show up by 9:07, you would miss the coffee truck).

Jeff Dean’s memories also prompted LeCun to send a congratulatory message: In Silicon Valley, 25 years seems like a century has passed.

Google has also grown from such a small showcase to the technology giant it is today.

^{Reference link: https://medium.com/hackernoon/this-is-going-to-be-huge-google-founders-collection-comes-to-chm-27356256731f}

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