The Jeff Dean Canon
On August 5, Google announced that Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years. He’s co-founding Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation, with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Sundar Pichai’s note put it plainly: “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new” (Google). Steven Levy’s account in Wired opens eleven days earlier, on July 25, with Dean talking to 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco while Discovery Loop was still unannounced.
I’ve spent most of my career in and around distributed systems infrastructure, and there’s a genre of engineering influence that never shows up in an org chart. Dean’s work is the substrate a whole generation of us built on, usually without knowing whose ideas we were standing on. If you’ve written a MapReduce job, tuned a p99, used an embedding, or...
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