The Jeff Dean Facts
github.com535 points by ravenical a day ago
535 points by ravenical a day ago
Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them.
It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up.
At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts.
I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :)
On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it.
It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity.
But everyone enjoyed it!
My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(
My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n).
Hi Kenton! No worries at all. I tend to be quieter than Jeff anyway (less public speaking etc.) and I am happy to not have a dedicated website. :-). -Sanjay
Hey Sanjay, long time no see. Thanks for the note!
But I'm fully aware you wouldn't want a "Sanjay Facts", and that's not the point. ;)
You are both legends. Your original MapReduce paper is what inspired me to work for Google (2006-2009), narrowly dodging a career as a quant on Wall Street.
Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :)
This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...
I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(.
Hi Ari,
Thanks so much for falling for my trick and taking it over, I was getting pretty sick of dealing with the same issues you describe. :)
One of the reasons Cloudflare Workers has a policy that we absolutely never break deployed code, ever. (Well... at least not intentionally...)
I just searched Moma, and your note about it going down is the most recent update on this front. Interestingly though, it looks like Moma itself has a custom SERP renderer for Jeff Dean facts that came up when I searched. The example fact that came up was hilarious, but I guess I shouldn't share it on public HN.
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases.
But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases.
I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. But if you try to calculate every second and third order consequence of everything that you do, let alone any moments of humor you might have.. Well, you might as well lock yourself in a cell now.
> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular
I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture and easier for them to engage with… that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.
I'm not at all saying this to demonize Kenton. We can make mistakes and reflect on them later, and that's laudable. But it is important to recognize these systems for what they are, so that we can notice them when they happen all around us every day.
I find the assumption that Jeff Dean sounded better with these jokes because it sounds American to be a bigger issue than immediately acknowledging that it’s probably because it’s less syllables. These type of jokes are rapid fire and a lengthy name just fits better whether it’s ‘Jeff Dean’ or ‘Neel Patel’.
I don't think it's really fair to call it racism. That is such a loaded accusation to levy today that it should only be used if someone really wronged another person.
We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if throwing around the r-word is helpful.
> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point.
Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities?
I see. I hadn't thought of it from a perspective of dominant culture. Looking at it that way, it can appear racist.
I looked at it from the perspective of syllable count. Jeff Dean is easier to say by that measure. If Jeff were instead named Alexander Chesterton, would he still be the obvious choice to head the facts? My takeaway from this is that a single-syllable name is perhaps a great boon.
> that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.
It’s not “racism.” There’s plenty of Indians with names that are easy for English speakers. Conversely, the same situations would’ve presented itself if the other person was any sort of white Eastern European.
In fact, calling this “racist” is itself racist. I have close friends with family names from Poland or Croatia where we don’t even try to pronounce their names correctly. Nobody feels bad about that. But for some reason if it’s a “brown person” we’re suddenly super sensitive about it. That is differential treatment based on race.
People get awkward about how to pronounce my name because I’m brown. But it’s hard to pronounce because it’s misspelled Germanic! They wouldn’t act that way if I was a white guy with the same name.
Are we... arguing about what happened in my head?
As the world's foremost expert about what happened in my head, do I get to, like, pick a winner here?
If so I pick tczMUFlmoNk, I think their description is accurate. (I think you might want to re-read it as it feels like you are responding to something else.)
If I don't get to pick, this is quite weird! "People on Hacker News tell me I'm wrong about my own thoughts." was not on my -- actually wait, that doesn't sound unexpected at all now that I write it out! OK, carry on.
You wrote what your thoughts were. I’m just weighing in on whether your thoughts are “racist.” To the extent you feel sensitive about the issue because someone has darker skin, where you probably wouldn’t have written that part of the post if the other guy were Polish, that’s racist. It’s racist to treat people differently based on skin color, even if you’re well intentioned about it.
You're conflating two different things:
1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand.
2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages systematically correlate with certain cultural backgrounds more than others isn't "differential treatment based on skin color", it is observing a statistical pattern in outcomes.
And here's the key point: given Kenton's explanation, they are indicating they would reflect the same way if Sanjay had been Polish with an unfamiliar surname. You're arguing with Kenton about what Kenton thinks and could think... while Kenton is right here. At some point you have to engage with what he's actually saying rather than insisting you understand his mind better than he does.
Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it.
(Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)
What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.”
Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on.
If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards?