Word
And because that last post had so many words, here’s a shorter one about, well, words.
A few key phrases to know if you ever attend a meeting in the GooglePlex:
Orthogonal
Engineers are always talking about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like “11-sided.” It doesn’t. I’ve read the definition many times. I still don’t really get it, which didn’t stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers. “Oh, yeah, that press release is totally orthogonal to the ads we’re running on Yahoo.”
Cruft
Cruft is bad. Like the stuff that grows under ungroomed toenails. Like barnacles on a speed boat. It usually refers to old code or dead links on a web page, but it can be applied to any unwanted material that accumulates anywhere. The men’s locker room in the Googleplex was filled with cruft, much of it unwashed and hockey-related.
Canonical
When engineers don’t want to say “the customary” or “the usual” way of doing something, they talk about the canonical example, which is pretty much the same thing, but conveys a more exalted sense of correctness to the practice in question. The canonical way to avoid spending an hour in traffic is to come to work at noon.
Non-trivial
It means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane.
So…
This all-purpose word is not a word at all. It’s the sound of an engineer clearing his or her throat before beginning to speak. The first week I worked at Google, it seemed like some sort of linguistic virus had infected all the technical staff. Every sentence in every conversation began, “So…” So… I eventually got used to it.
A few key phrases to know if you ever attend a meeting in the GooglePlex:
Orthogonal
Engineers are always talking about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like “11-sided.” It doesn’t. I’ve read the definition many times. I still don’t really get it, which didn’t stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers. “Oh, yeah, that press release is totally orthogonal to the ads we’re running on Yahoo.”
Cruft
Cruft is bad. Like the stuff that grows under ungroomed toenails. Like barnacles on a speed boat. It usually refers to old code or dead links on a web page, but it can be applied to any unwanted material that accumulates anywhere. The men’s locker room in the Googleplex was filled with cruft, much of it unwashed and hockey-related.
Canonical
When engineers don’t want to say “the customary” or “the usual” way of doing something, they talk about the canonical example, which is pretty much the same thing, but conveys a more exalted sense of correctness to the practice in question. The canonical way to avoid spending an hour in traffic is to come to work at noon.
Non-trivial
It means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane.
So…
This all-purpose word is not a word at all. It’s the sound of an engineer clearing his or her throat before beginning to speak. The first week I worked at Google, it seemed like some sort of linguistic virus had infected all the technical staff. Every sentence in every conversation began, “So…” So… I eventually got used to it.
44 Comments:
ahhh. i loved this post. great read and educational to boot.. i love the entry on 'so....' now i'm going to go read the def on 'orthogonal' on wpedia.
i know i'm not alone in hoping you one day put these posts in extended version into a novel of some sort, perhaps in short story style a la david sedaris, etc.
The "So" thing is not unique to google. It's rampant in tech companies (and probably others) because it's fashionable for no other reason than to convey that the person saying it knows how to sound like everyone else that says it for no reason.
It makes me want to smash things when I hear it.
Nice post! About the 'orthogonal' thing, I believe all it means is unrelated. That is to say, the two concepts you are comparing don't have anything on common.
It derives from mathematics, where you say two lines [vectors] run orthogonal to each other when the first crosses the second in a straight cut, i.e. it doesn't even go one bit in the other one's direction. Right?
orthogonal is pretty much perpendicular but in a generalized sense, so it would mean unrelated.
orthogonal is pretty much perpendicular but in a generalized sense, so it would mean unrelated.
Besides the "So…" I thought on every entry: "But this is just a common word!".
So, well done, you made me feel like a real nerd now. And maybe I use the S-word too.
Yeah the word Non Trivial is used by me quite a bit, As well as so.
Non trivial is some thing which Google with such brainly people could use less, rather than other IT companies..
So catch u soon.
"orthagonal" comes from graphs - if you think of a common chart with an X and a Y axis, like a sales-over-time chart. The two axis are orthagonal to each other (at right angles as anonymous said), and no matter what you do to the "X" value of a data point, that has no impact on it's "Y" value - so the issue of server uptime might be orthagonal to the CPU speed - you can plot them both on 2-axis chart, but changing one value should have no impact on the other.
Non-trivial can also be used to describe tasks that are annoying and that engineers don't want to do. I wrote a brief post about the phrase "non-trivial" on my blog 3 years ago.
Are you sure these guys are engineers??
I have a great number of friends educated in engineering, and they never use these terms.
'Orthogonal', 'Canonical', 'Trivial' is part of the jargon used at physics, mathematics, computer-science departments. I spent some years saying them myself :)
Btw.
Canonical is kind of like 'prototype' or 'unity' example that retains all the traits of the original problem, while 'non-trivial' can be substituted by 'I can do it, but I (and others) find it very hard/complicated'. Trivial is thus a subjective term. Come time, and things tend to become 'trivial'. Today it's non-trivial to do a Google search engine, but someday it'll become 'trivial'.
Mathematicians use the term 'trivial' extensively. Richard P. Feynman gives a very entertaining (and true to life) account of the word 'trivial', and the mathematicians use of it, in the book 'Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman'. Worth a read.
Cheers
-michael
"Soo..." is just another way to use up the conversational bandwidth whilst continuing to prepare a real response. I read a book by a guy who worked at the Xerox PARC, and they would say "mumble" when they were at a pause but wanted the attention for what they were about to say.
Interesting - I never noticed how much people at Google say "so" before you pointed it out.
I think "so" is shorthand for "what is the logical result of what has just been said". A diet of mathematics makes someone speak like this. Conversation as derivation.
Yes, "orthagonal" means unrelated in engineering-speak, but it also is a way of saying that the problems can be solved/managed independently. "The press release can be written by Doug, and the ads on Yahoo can be handled by Ron."
One thing many of us want to know -- how many options did people get? I don't need to know the exact #...just some general rules of thumb, like an mid-level engineer probably got X back in 1999 or 2000. Understand that we all want to play "what if" scenarios in our heads...
Is it true that your stock split several times before the IPO? So if you were given 10k options in 1999, it might have been, say 40k shares today?
Orthogonal is the science of othodontics, gonads, founded by a guy named Al.
Funny enough, Eric Lippert just blogged about orthogonal too.
So had a whole article dedicated to it in Slate pre .com lockup expiration. It's still around. wow.
I even had Russian colleagues that latched onto so. I'm sure Noam Chomsky would be impressed.
Perhaps someone could do a comedy in the style of "Dude, Where's My Car?" entitled "So, Where's My Laptop?"
Would y'all commenters please stop using the word "orthagonal"? It's annoying the heck out of me. Where'd you learn it? There is no such word. It's orthogonal, stupid.
etymonline.com/index.php?search=ortho.
I heard a lot of "orthogonal" and "so..." back at the startup I worked at in 1999. It's not a Googleism, it's a Silicon Valley-ism.
You say "so..." because "um..." makes you sound stupid or impatient.
I realized last night that "so..." was a virus last night when I heard my four-year-old say it.
"Fun" and "Interesting" are words used around my campus when discussing problems that just happen to be a touch above "Non-Trivial."
So.... more than half the recorded dharma talks at the web-site for the Redwood City "Insight Meditation Center" start with "So...".
Someday I may point that out to the speaker, Gil Fronsdal.
I went and read the defination of 'orthogonal'. for some reason, though it reminds me of going to get my braces removed.
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So...yeah, engineers do use all those words a lot. I just love the way you put it. Funny, trivial, but funny.
Orthogonal--whatever you do has no effect on anything else. Sort of as in (x,y,z) space, changing z has no effect on (x,y)
Canonical--a damned good example
Trivial--takes a couple of minutes
Non-trivial--does not take a couple of minutes, tending toward infinity. Example: "Fixing that bug is non-trivial" could mean rewriting the OS, LOL.
So... that was a really clever post. I'm a software engineer and am guilty of using a few of these. My wife, who is a Speech Pathologist, has chastised me before for excessivley starting sentences that way. I'll just have to explain to her that it's non-trivial for me to correct that habit.
There's also "that's funny", which is computer-guy-speak for "Oh shit, I've never seen that happen before. We're screwed."
Canonical: according to canon (the accepted principle or rule.) For example, the canonical order of letters is A, B, etc. The word sometimes connotes a longing to achive new insight into a problem that goes beyond the commonly accepted wisdom. Other times it just means something is sorted.
When I was in Limerick, Ireland, I noticed that people used "so" at the end of their sentences, as almost a period. "I'll see you at work, so".
It was a significant percentage of words spoken in informal conversation.
"So" is much more nasty and passive-aggressive than you're making it out to be, I think. I hear it a lot in passing at work (definitely not a Google-only thing) and do my best to avoid using it myself.
Wow!
I am norwegian and talk like this, is it due to my background in particle physics?
Strange and funny!
Orthogonal refers to right angledness and squareness, which are both measures of quality.
Consider the masons square, or
to say something is squared up.
Non-trivial: keyword to the customer that "we think it could eventually be done given some astronomically large amount of effort, and we're willing to do it for the money if you really want to make us do it, but you probably don't want to pay us as much as it's going to cost to make it happen".
hahaha. great post. :) i learned how to talk this way from my berkeley cs profs. "right. so... basically you have..." :)
Two orthogonal lines or line segments meeting in a plane would be perpendicular to each other. Two orthogonal lines or line segments meeting in a space with three or more dimensions would define a plane. Simple math.
Terms like non-trivial, orthogonal, etc... were also in heavy use at AOL in the mid-90s, when I was working there. This is not unique to Google or SoCal, this is something more common to people with an English-speaking engineering/mathematics/physics education. Note that most of the best engineers and developers at AOL during the mid-90s came over with Barry Appelman and Mike Connors from IBMs T. J. Watson Research Center, when AOL managed to hire Mike away from IBM.
Many of these terms have been around the hacker's community for lo these many years. Terms like "non-trivial" and "orthogonal" were common parlance at MIT in the '70s, and probably for 10-20 years before that. If they hadn't spread to the west coast before, I'm sure Feynman helped popularize many of them at CalTech after his undergrad years at MIT.
Google "hacker's dictionary" to find one of the many mirrors of an extensive list of terms, their meanings, and often entertaining (to geeks, anyway) stories that go with them.
For signs that so will not be leaving us read any of Heinlein's shorter novels. RAH came from engineering himself and may have had a near terminal case of the SO virus to judge from his chacters speach patterns. Of course if you haven't read any of them you can hardly be a sci-fi geek so this post is probably redundent.
Anonymous said...
There's also "that's funny", which is computer-guy-speak for "Oh shit, I've never seen that happen before. We're screwed."
So true! Caught me many times saying it..
Orthogonality should be very familiar to anyone who has taken a Linear Algebra course, and that should include anyone with a college degree in a field related to information technology, engineering, or mathematics. Thereafter, you will inevitably use the concept extensively because it is powerful, and quite general, but whether you abuse the word in this way depends on your local cultural dialect. Nonetheless, your meaning will be immediately clear to any listener who took the course or read the book. And your abuse of it should also be clear. Local cultural conditions determine the degree of license afforded to such abuses.
So... I think you've just re-discovered the engineering linguistic equivalent to "bogons". Look it up in the Hacker's Jargon dictionary.
Another Google words us engineers would use is L+S code. Basically, L+S code was hideously bad code, yep bad, that worked and had been written by L+S. It was a bit of an honor to rewrite/replace it.
"Non-trivial" reminds me of my number theory and linear algebra profs. They used it when they were in the middle of a proof and were too lazy to write the rest of it.
...usually followed by the prof saying "the rest is left as an exercise for you." Bastards.
Yeah, "orthogonal" is rooted in linear algebra, and the concept of independent basis vectors, and the like. Like several other mathematical concepts, it's too useful a concept to discard when working in a nonmathematical field (such as talking to managers), but it's too complicated to explain to someone in thirty seconds.
Trivial/nontrivial has been a kind of injoke for ages: any problem is either "trivial" (too simple to be worth consideration) or "nontrivial" (impossible, or at least PhD-thesis-level difficult).
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