There isn't much information but this reads more like an advertisement for google internships than anything else. Not to denigrate her work, she could very well be brilliant and have gone above and beyond, but from how it reads they could be blowing it up to make it seem like every intern has a huge impact and you could too! Either way good for her, but not sure why this is so high up on HN.
I suspect this is exactly correct. First, it plays to a lot of colleges who are having career fairs this month as their seniors consider what to do after graduation. Second it plays to what has been the biggest job selector for new graduates over the last 5 years, "Will I be able to make an impact?". The number one way to discourage people from going to BigCo is to point out that they are going to spend 3 - 5 years just getting enough of a political network developed in order to be given a chance at an assignment that might move the needle slightly.
Last year I was walking around a recruiting event at CU and just listening to the pitches being made by companies Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn (and in full disclosure was making the same sort of pitches for IBM with "Hey its the Watson group, its the most important company project and we're building one of the most important projects in it!" all to counter the fact that it was hundreds of thousands of employees, most of which were not having much impact at all.
You need stories where you can pitch them "if you're brilliant enough and work hard enough you can be the person who changes the world." otherwise the siren song of startups of "You will probably eat lunch with the CEO at least once a month, and everything you do will be really impactful." will carry the day.
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At the scale at which Google operates even small optimizations can save tons of data. Not saying this was a small contribution, but I agree, mostly internship advertising.
A lot of my friends who have interned at Google felt insignificant, Google needs this counter-marketing.
I think that is how so many school projects and internships end up. You just feel like fuel for some grant machine, your contributions are overblown and you might not have been able to contribute as much as you wanted or maybe you didn't get nearly as much mentorship as you were promised and expecting, but everyone plays along and so it continues. I would like to think that if you go high enough eventually you end up in places where the experience matches the expectation better but maybe not.
Per the parent's comment, Google needs to market their internships because there is little value to them, because as interns his friends felt insignificant.
I would say in my day, a Google Internship would have been amazing experience, even if I wasn't special and unique, however, Google wasn't really a the massive behemoth in 2001 (I first started using Google at my internship when the head of IT told me about it).
It is strange. They were trying to decrease update sizes by using File-by-File patching, for example, but never decided to use the best applicable compression library until an intern came along?
According to the article Brotli compression was only launched in 2015 and she did the integration work in the summer of 2016. Bearing in mind we don't know how much of an improvement to Brotli was made during the intervening period and what the evaluation and adoption criteria were that actually seems pretty prompt.
This, and I'd see it as probably something that was on the Play team's roadmap that they decided was a project that would be a good fit for a summer intern, and they may have deferred the work by a few months on that basis.
Speaking from my own experience trying to put together good intern projects, it's actually pretty tough to find that magic combination of something that will occupy an entry-level programmer for a summer, and give them a sense of accomplishment, and actually be useful to the team in the long term. In the past I've deferred useful work so that it could be given to an intern.
As someone who has managed interns, this is exactly my take. It's easy to have wishlist items that you never get to. Things like this are ideal in that they are not time-sensitive, don't require a lot of additional knowledge to do proof-of-concept work on, are accessible to undergrads, and you can be pretty confident in the implementation if it passes unit tests.
She gets much of the recognition, and the blog states she made the evaluation (followed by a simple comparison table) and then implemented changes to the servers while a small, subtle shout out goes out to the authors of the compression algorithm. It's as if the credit was passed on to her for the purpose of google internship advertising.
I think outside of this article, it's very different who gets recognition here.
If it's an interesting article with relevant content (I'd not heard of Brotli compression before), so what? Unless you're advocating active hostility to companies like Googe, to particularly discourage relevant content with such connections. In which case would you like to justify that?
