Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン
Principal Engineer at Google. Simplicity and optimism. Personal opinions.
- The lack of systems thinking in AI production systems is destroying my soul. It’s a major cultural challenge and most of the best engineers I know stay away from this field due to past burnout.
- There isn’t a single good example of a foundational model access API that provides composibility layers, bidirectional multimodal streaming, and optionally state management. People often get two of them correctly, not all three.
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- Almost all major projects I worked on started by 2-3 people sitting in the same meeting room and coding while debating for hours every day without any other distraction.
- I decided to cancel my transfer to DeepMind to be able to focus on distributed AI systems and open models. So much to do here, and last week's DeepSeek moment completely helped me revisit some long term goals.
- Never bet against a few passionate people who want to unblock tens of thousands of companies.
- When you zoom in, you see the same stages underneath a single company too. - Early stage: Elitism among teams - Advanced stage: Monopoly on decision making and execution - Terminal stage: Blaming successful teams Culture matters. It can save you or accelerate your decline to the terminal stage.
- Decentralize everything. Open things where possible. Everyone wins.
- The biggest winner of the AI race will be distributed systems people. Everything is converging onto a distributed network of stuff and it is only accelerating in the last two years.
- People are wondering why I'm enjoying the LLM period: - Thick client vs thin client fight - Actor model vs RPC fight As an engineer, I cannot think of a better way to challenge our conventional thinking. It entertains me intellectually but is also making me a better engineer.
- For someone who is programming for over 30 years, it's hard for me to believe every system, every model, every chip, every program will be fungible and regeneratable. There will be new systems/patterns that will end up becoming the new infra overlords, we just don't know which.
- When you have a highly ambiguous systems problem, try to solve it for the distributed case first. When you solve it for the distributed case, it's easy to pack things together in a monolith. The opposite is almost always impossible.
- Good software engineering is about encapsulating complexity while avoiding hiding away failure modes.
- This month is my last at Google. In a month, I'm joining Google DeepMind. Our job will be making DeepMind's work publicly available in ways that wasn't possible before. While this is one of the biggest challenges in my life, it's potentially going to be the most rewarding.
- Building is very easy but it also lowers the bar to build stupid things.
- I like to be used as OCD as a service.
- The most fascinating reality to me is you have to build a whole new person around languages you speak, especially if they have distinct communication styles or are from different language families.
- Trying to have a deep, meaningful conversation in three languages is an exercise in futility. The mental juggling and context switch inevitably distracts even native speakers. Speaking multiple languages myself, I wouldn't put anyone through that, not even my worst enemy.
- I am debating how close I became to retirement and people are in denial because they knew that I always wanted to work until 80s. My justification is simple: I don't want to stop working. I want to start working ;)
- We need to normalize being a solo developer again.
- This is the closest I've ever come to truly wanting to retire. It's a complicated feeling.
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- Immersing myself in the Dune universe for an entire day, with "Prophecy" and both films, was probably not ideal before coming back to work after a long holiday. I'm now completely indoctrinated against the thinking machines.
- I am genuinely surprised to learn that reading a document could make you physically sick. It seems our brains can become so entrenched in a particular way of thinking that encountering alternative perspectives, even similar ones, feels like a violation, almost a primal rejection.
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- Once big mountains are very hard to move, people only work on tactical problems. Then, you end up with a saturation of narrow use case projects.
- Large language models made few hard problems in NLP and IR relatively tackable for the first time in my lifetime. Working on agglutinative languages, we table flipped on several of these problems without much progress 20 years ago. In the last two years, I’m actually considering going back.
- Travel sucks. I have been doing nothing but sleeping in the last 72 hours with fever (+nightmares) due to stomach flu. I ate almost nothing in the last three days. I’m slowly recovering but I’ve never experienced anything like this before and it’s been harder than the hardest recovery.
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- Cooking begins! 🦃
- People coming from startups to large companies sometimes underestimate how much damage could be done by shipping crap. If you ship crap, it sometimes drags the company and cause exponential damage. People build layers of crap over crap. At a startup, the damage is contained.
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