how do you feel about still having to use outlook because of concerns about a competitor that's not even doing social anymore? I've read FB SWEs be aghast about people uploading whiteboard photos to Google Photos to be searchable later, paranoid about Larry and Sergey poring over all the data while twirling their evil mustache.
Also, if impressing other people is not what you're optimizing for then you might not have a great trajectory at a company that's obsessed with i m p a c t and hallucinating metrics to measure it.
Some parts of working at FB as a SWE are awesome, some aren't, everyone's mileage certainly varies.
Surprised the parent's downvoted - it's as close to the truth as anything else.
Like a lot of Google products, Photos has a lot of forebears. Picasa was one of them, as was Google+ (IIRC, the Picasa team was folded into Google+ when Larry refocused the company on Social in 2011). Sounds like Bump was also aquihired into it, and I think there was also a lot of cross-pollination between Image Search, Research, and Google Photos around some of the search & content recognition features.
some of that team helped build the Google Photos app, but Google Photos was a product in its own right even before Bump joined the company and they were part of a (much) larger effort, of course.
One of the things that amuses me is trying to find racist/sexist google search results. Here's a few:
I remember a while back Google got flack because the image search for "scientist" was almost entirely famous African American scientists. That's now changed and shows stock images of (mostly white) people in lab coats.
"Three black teenagers" shows mostly groups of mugshots.
The word "Brazilian" shows hot, almost nude women. "German" shows the flag. "Portuguese" shows maps, flags, and a lot of normal looking people. "Hispanic" all pictures are normal looking people.
Seeing images that would be 'racist' or 'sexist' is reflective of you, not the results. For instance if you search for 'white man and white woman' you'll find almost exclusively pictures of interracial couples. Is it some conspiracy to push interracial relations onto people? People of a different bias would say so, and it's equally ridiculous. In reality the simple matter is that Google's search is still extremely primitive and the results are mediocre at best. So you can easily break the search when searching for anything that cannot be trivially mapped to a direct text mapping such as e.g. Justin Bieber or Abraham Lincoln.
For instance search for 'green circle' - okay you get mostly green circles. Now search for 'green circle with red line' and the results are completely nonsensical. The huge leap forward in search engines was being able to avoid returning hardcore porn when searching for Abraham Lincoln. But in spite of tens of thousands of engineers, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and all sorts of fancy declarations of ultra sophisticated AI solving every problem under the sun, we really haven't moved that far beyond that early milestone.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest I think the AI/search results are actually racist/sexist. If I really believed that, I wouldn't find it amusing. As you suggest, it's an amusing anecdote which shows how much farther we have to go with regards to getting ML/AI/search right.
'Brazilian' has other meanings you may be unaware of... namely it being the name for a bikini wax. Almost nude women is beyond expected in this case. Just another example of how complex these things are linguistic and cuturally.
I'm not suggesting that models are an illegitimate way of representing the word "Brazilian." There's normal Brazilian people, Brazilian monuments, maybe the flag, the relatively "clinical" pictures that come up with "Brazilian wax", and of course models. The fact that all of the results for "Brazilian" are only in one of those categories shows a bias that I find amusing.
Well, to be fair they excluded high tens / low hundreds of potentially offensive terms from search before even launching and when this came out they just extended the list a little.
Sometimes having product vision requires recognizing that the products you build come with limitations and potential for very real emotional reactions of very real human being users.
Sure, you can create a set of 'face templates' that may or not be linked to a profile, and then match against them as long as you have some meaningful way to use the matching templates without a profile.
unfortunately, it certainly doesn't seem like the company does this all the time. i got placed onto a team which has no bearing on my background experience whatsoever, and after approaching my tech lead and some HR people to continue the conversation, everyone else decided to agree that the 18 months guideline was "fair" and that the 20% projects were there to satisfy my need for interesting problems.
i had potential teams lined up (one of which I would've been allocated to initially, had they not hit their new grad hire cap), so it was certainly a very frustrating experience. perhaps they care more about established engineers than recent graduates?
that's weird, because my experience is exactly the opposite! I've spent about 4 months on my team so far, which has very little to do with my background, and after I realized just how bad the fit was, I started a conversation with my tech lead, his supervisors, and some HR people about moving to a team that would be a better fit (which had openings at the time).
3 weeks of conversations later, I was told that the 18 month rule was "fair" in everyone's opinion, and that if I'm really concerned about working on projects that are interesting to me, I should just find one to spend my 20% time on (easier said than done).
This is also not entirely accurate. I got my offer a good 5 months before I even knew which teams I had a chance to speak with before the allocation process, let alone before I knew which team I would be placed on.
