Into the breach

Ron sez:

I dove into the adstoo project with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which I'm ashamed to say wasn't much. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that we had no Java development infrastructure. We were writing bareback, so to speak. We had no debugger. We were using JSP, but had no editor support for JSP syntax. (That turned into a real debugging nightmare. It could take many tens of minutes to find a single typographical error because the only indication that there was a problem was that the output just looked all wrong, but the actual problem could be very far away from the apparent source of the problem.)

Fortunately for me, I was assigned a junior engineer to work with/for me, and he actually knew what he was doing. While I struggled to learn the Java libraries and debugging techniques (I knew the basic language, but I had never done any serious development in it before) this guy just took the bull by the horns and pretty much just wrote the whole damn thing in a matter of weeks. I sometimes pull this old joke out of the dustbin, that in the ancient tradition of senior-junior relationships, he did all the work and I took all the credit.

That's not quite true. I did end up writing the credit card billing and accounting system, which is a nontrivial thing to get right. Fortunately for me, just before coming to Google I had taken some time to study computer security and cryptography, so I was actually well prepared for that particular task. Back in those days internal security was more or less nonexistent. All the engineers had root access to all of the servers. But I believe in planning ahead, and I anticipated the day when Google was not going to be a small company any more, and so I designed the billing system to be secure against even a dishonest employee with root access (which is not such an easy thing to do). I have no idea if they are still using my system, but if they are then I'd feel pretty confident that my credit card number was not going to get stolen.

But on the whole I was struggling, not just technically, but personally as well. The situation was exacerbated by my manager, who thought that the answer to my falling behind schedule was to start micromanaging me. That just made things worse. Much worse. I had been a senior scientist at a national research lab, essentially the equivalent of a tenured professor (but without the teaching responsibilities). I was used to being my own boss more or less, and I really resented being asked to make detailed lists of everything was going to do every single day. After all, Google had come asking me to join them, and so I felt I ought to be accorded more respect. But on the other hand I had to admit that I was not really performing, and so all the micromanagement was in some sense justified. I responded, I'm ashamed to admit, with some passive-aggressive head games, and so the situation deteriorated rapidly to the point where my manager and I were barely on speaking terms.

Things were made worse by the fact that I had been assigned an office mate who was also new to Google, and who was not part of the ads group. Most of the other ads group members were sharing offices (or cubicles) with other ads group members, and so I felt I wasn't really part of the club. On top of that, I was away from home and didn't really have a life up there in Northern California. The stress mounted. I started to get paranoid that I would get fired before reaching the one-year mark. I started experiencing stress-related health problems, some of which are still with me today. On more than one occasion I came that close to quitting. To this day I have no idea why I didn't.

It was about this time that I had my one and only meeting with Larry Page. It was to discuss the progress of the adstoo project and to set a launch date. My manager was there along with a couple of other people (including Doug I think). Things went smoothly until Larry suggested changing the way billing was handled. I don't remember the details, but my response was that this would be significant work. No one challenged me, but I found out later that the reaction of people in the room was something along the lines of, "Is he crazy? This ought to be a trivial change." This little incident turned out to have very far ranging repurcussions later, but that will have to wait for the next blog entry.

Somehow we actually managed to launch AdWords on schedule, in September of 2000. It still seems like a bloody miracle. Most of the credit goes to Jeremy, Ed and Schwim. It could not have been done without them.

I can still remember watching the very first ad roll in. It was for a company called Lively Lobsters. Two months ago, after five years of intending to do so, I finally bought myself a little toy stuffed lobster to commemorate the occasion. (Update on 12/9/2005: It appears that Lively Lobsters has gone out of business. There's some irony for you.)

About two weeks later all hell broke loose.