of gathering data from the shadowy corners of the web and feeding it to his army of servers. Perhaps he drew his power from the red socks he wore every day.
Growing up ten miles outside Basel, Switzerland, Urs had considered a career in chemistry, but he found programming more definitive. "You could invent something," he explained, "and then if it didn't work, you could always deduce why. It wasn't random." A thing is right or it's wrong. If it's wrong, there's a reason, so you work on it until it becomes right. Engineers live in a binary world. Sometimes I envied that clarity.
Urs narrowed his focus to computer architecture at university in Zurich, then trekked off to Stanford for graduate work on "making stuff faster ... making stuff cheaper." He ended up teaching at UC Santa Barbara and developing the core of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) at a small startup. I could lie and say I knew what that meant, but it would betray the trust I've established with you as a reader. To Googlers who used their computers for more than checking email, however, having worked on the JVM made Urs some kind of demigod. So Larry and Sergey were thrilled when he said he'd fix Google's systems problem and turn their "student project" into something reasonably stable and scalable.
Infrastructure is just not all that exciting to those outside a small cult of spec heads who willingly cloister themselves to focus on improving systems that—if they work the way they should—are all but invisible. Larry and Sergey were ensconced in the highest order of Google engineers, but they were not acolytes who needed to know where every bit was buried.
Urs cared, though. He cared a great deal.
"Urs was interested in how we got there and not just the result," said Ben Smith, an engineer who worked on GWS. "You increase the cache hit rate by two percent, and you save three hundred machines. That's the stuff he likes. Without Urs, Google's infrastructure wouldn't have lasted two years."
At first I didn't understand how lucky Google had been to bring Urs onboard. To me he was just another engineer scribbling jargon on whiteboards. But in talking with those who worked under him I came to realize that he was, as Deb Kelly, an engineering project manager, called him, "the key."
"He's got the most fabulous command of detail at a broad level of any human being I've ever met," Deb told me. "He had a tremendous amount of the organization in his head." That knowledge earned Urs the trust of Larry and Sergey and enabled him to keep the founders off the backs of the working engineers.
"Once Larry and Sergey needed to attend to other things," said search-quality engineer Ben Gomes, "Urs was the key person on the engineering side. Whenever there was a crisis he was always called in to deal with it himself."
Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code. And if they weren't rhapsodizing about Urs's intelligence, his team members were lauding his communications skills, which kept him from seeming arrogant.
"I've seen him walk into a meeting where he had no context," Gomes continued, "and halfway through the meeting, he was asking the most insightful questions. He was able to put together an argument so that it's obvious this is what you should be doing. The founders are dreamers and that's wonderful, but Urs was always the voice of 'the art of the possible.'"
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
Growing up ten miles outside Basel, Switzerland, Urs had considered a career in chemistry, but he found programming more definitive. "You could invent something," he explained, "and then if it didn't work, you could always deduce why. It wasn't random." A thing is right or it's wrong. If it's wrong, there's a reason, so you work on it until it becomes right. Engineers live in a binary world. Sometimes I envied that clarity.
Urs narrowed his focus to computer architecture at university in Zurich, then trekked off to Stanford for graduate work on "making stuff faster ... making stuff cheaper." He ended up teaching at UC Santa Barbara and developing the core of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) at a small startup. I could lie and say I knew what that meant, but it would betray the trust I've established with you as a reader. To Googlers who used their computers for more than checking email, however, having worked on the JVM made Urs some kind of demigod. So Larry and Sergey were thrilled when he said he'd fix Google's systems problem and turn their "student project" into something reasonably stable and scalable.
Infrastructure is just not all that exciting to those outside a small cult of spec heads who willingly cloister themselves to focus on improving systems that—if they work the way they should—are all but invisible. Larry and Sergey were ensconced in the highest order of Google engineers, but they were not acolytes who needed to know where every bit was buried.
Urs cared, though. He cared a great deal.
"Urs was interested in how we got there and not just the result," said Ben Smith, an engineer who worked on GWS. "You increase the cache hit rate by two percent, and you save three hundred machines. That's the stuff he likes. Without Urs, Google's infrastructure wouldn't have lasted two years."
At first I didn't understand how lucky Google had been to bring Urs onboard. To me he was just another engineer scribbling jargon on whiteboards. But in talking with those who worked under him I came to realize that he was, as Deb Kelly, an engineering project manager, called him, "the key."
"He's got the most fabulous command of detail at a broad level of any human being I've ever met," Deb told me. "He had a tremendous amount of the organization in his head." That knowledge earned Urs the trust of Larry and Sergey and enabled him to keep the founders off the backs of the working engineers.
"Once Larry and Sergey needed to attend to other things," said search-quality engineer Ben Gomes, "Urs was the key person on the engineering side. Whenever there was a crisis he was always called in to deal with it himself."
Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code. And if they weren't rhapsodizing about Urs's intelligence, his team members were lauding his communications skills, which kept him from seeming arrogant.
"I've seen him walk into a meeting where he had no context," Gomes continued, "and halfway through the meeting, he was asking the most insightful questions. He was able to put together an argument so that it's obvious this is what you should be doing. The founders are dreamers and that's wonderful, but Urs was always the voice of 'the art of the possible.'"
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
Similar Books
