A Turing Award laureate came to attend a class but could only sit on the floor. How incredible is Google's "hidden genius"?

It sounds so absurd that it seems like a lie, yet it has become increasingly popular in the tech circle! A collection of meme pictures and jokes titled "Jeff Dean Facts", which has been compiled into a GitHub repository and widely circulated in the tech circle, has turned the tech community into a place of idol worship.

The "idol - making" movement is also prevalent in the tech circle.

It's not achieved through red carpets and trophies, but through meme - making:

When Jeff Dean submits code, he compiles and runs it, but only to check if there are bugs in the compiler and CPU;

There are only two keys on Jeff Dean's keyboard: 0 and 1;

When God said, "Let there be light," Jeff Dean was there doing code reviews...

The above popular internet memes come from a post called "Jeff Dean Facts".

This is one of the most unique cultures on the internet: the more spoofed and absurd it is, the more people like to share it, and the more they feel they "get it".

Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google

The creator of "Jeff Dean Facts", Kenton Varda, cited his favorite joke in the post:

Jeff Dean puts on his pants one leg at a time. But if he had more than two legs, you'd see that his method is actually O(log n).

The first half of the joke deliberately portrays him as an ordinary person, putting on pants one leg at a time.

The twist lies in the assumption that if he had n legs, he wouldn't brute - force it but would "optimize" to a more efficient O(log n) logarithmic - time algorithm.

This joke vividly depicts engineers' obsession with technology.

In fact, the real Jeff Dean in the real world is far more legendary than these internet memes.

Jeff Dean Facts: How an April Fools' Day Easter egg turned into the "Internet Bible"

Behind every internet - sweeping meme, there is an "instigator".

The birth of "Jeff Dean Facts" dates back more than a decade ago to a Google engineer named Kenton Varda.

Back around 2008, a meme called "Chuck Norris Facts" was popular on the internet at that time.

Chuck Norris is a famous American action - movie tough guy. Netizens fabricated countless exaggerated jokes about him to highlight his "omnipotence".

For example, "When Chuck Norris does push - ups, he doesn't push himself up; he pushes the earth down."

This form of "deifying someone with jokes" was quite popular in the internet culture at that time.

So, Kenton Varda and an anonymous colleague thought that if tough guys could have "Facts", why couldn't the "masters" in the tech circle?

So they set their sights on a legendary engineer within the company, Jeff Dean.

At that time, Google was internally testing a web - application hosting platform (later released externally as App Engine).

So, Kenton quickly built an anonymous website using this internal tool.

On this website, anyone could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate others' "facts" with a five - star rating, and view the hot list.

To ensure the website had content at the beginning of its launch, Kenton specifically found a few colleagues who were better at making jokes than him and pre - wrote some classic jokes.

On April 1, 2008, Kenton sent a letter to the company's all - staff email group using a fake email address, announcing the birth of the "Jeff Dean Facts" website.

Just as everyone was immersed in the frenzy of anonymous creation and sharing of jokes, the most classic twist came.

Jeff Dean spent only one or two hours querying various internal system status pages and server logs and accurately "tracked down" that the website's author was Kenton Varda.

This dramatic scene made "Jeff Dean Facts" itself a hardcore "Fact".

From then on, the joke evolved into a legend.

The legendary friendship that built Google

In the jokes, the compiler never "warns" Jeff Dean; it's Jeff Dean who "warns" the compiler.

In reality, Jeff Dean himself is also a legend.

He joined Google in mid - 1999 and was one of the company's early core employees.

Today, Jeff Dean's title is Google's chief scientist, responsible for the AI development of Google DeepMind and Google Research.

At that time, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were widely regarded as the only two Senior Fellows within Google (one of the highest technical ranks), and they were also jokingly called "Level 11" because they exceeded the original 10 - level limit.

A photo of Sanjay Ghemawat (left) and Jeff Dean (right) when they won the ACM–Infosys Foundation Award (a computing - science award) in 2012.

If you want to talk about Jeff Dean's "legendary engineering career at Google", Sanjay Ghemawat is a name that can't be avoided.

This pair of partners started collaborating closely during their time at the DEC Research Laboratory and then joined Google together. They jointly created a series of technological cornerstones that supported the Google empire and had a profound impact on the internet:

MapReduce: A programming model that completely changed the way of big - data processing.

BigTable: A distributed storage system that supports massive services such as Google Analytics and YouTube.

Spanner: A global distributed database.

TensorFlow: An open - source machine - learning framework that is widely used today.

Their way of cooperation is also quite legendary - "pair programming".

Many times, the two would sit side by side in front of the same computer: one would write code, and the other would observe, deduce, and discuss, and their roles would be interchanged at any time.

Jeff Dean once said, "When I work with Sanjay, the code we write together is better than what either of us could write alone."

An article about Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat published in The New Yorker in 2018, titled "The Friendship That Made Google Huge"

A netizen who once worked with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat thought that the above - mentioned article in The New Yorker truly reproduced their "admirable spirit of collaboration":

Every detail in this article is extremely real to me, including their personalities and their way of cooperation. I've always greatly admired their incredible spirit of collaboration.

They never compete with each other, and hardly compete with anyone else; they just quietly do excellent work and help others with their work at the same time.

In the eyes of their colleagues, their styles complement each other.

A former colleague's evaluation is quite typical: "Jeff is the smart one, and Sanjay is the wise one."

Jeff can always come up with ingenious techniques to make the system run faster, while Sanjay is better at making complex abstractions clear and understandable, or reminding Jeff that a certain solution may bring future maintenance costs.

People enjoy these jokes about Jeff Dean because they transform complex technical capabilities into simple and understandable "superpowers".

But what really supports Jeff Dean's title of "legendary engineer" is not the exaggerated descriptions in the jokes like "making the compiler kneel", but his and Sanjay's real contributions to Google's technical system. They designed, abstracted, and encapsulated extremely complex systems into stable and reusable public capabilities, thus empowering thousands of engineers.

Thanks to this, Google can continue to innovate and expand.

Compared with these contributions, "Jeff Dean Facts" is more like an embellishment. But it has made Jeff Dean well - known both inside and outside Google, inadvertently overshadowing his partner Sanjay Ghemawat.

This has even become a regret for the website creator, Kenton Varda, for many years.

Kenton later reflected: The website initially only focused on Jeff, but in fact, Jeff and Sanjay were almost like "conjoined twins" - many of Google's core technologies were jointly invented and refined by them.

The reason for only choosing Jeff at that time was simple: "Jeff Dean Facts" sounds more fluent than "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts".

This unintended act objectively made Jeff's shine overshadow Sanjay's.

But some netizens think that the jokes in "Jeff Dean Facts" won't cause any harm to Sanjay:

If you think about the second - order and third - order consequences of everything you do, not only will there be no humorous moments, but you might as well lock yourself in a cell right away.

As Kenton clarified in his interaction with netizens, "I'm not tortured by guilt; I just think that if I have another chance, I'll make this thing cover both of them."

These interactions between Kenton and netizens reveal a deeper theme: Behind a great technological legend, there is often not a one - man show.

Analyzing the jokes: Which are just for fun, and which "sound like the truth"

Why do people still enjoy believing these jokes even though they know they are just jokes, as if a joke has deceived everyone?

Because beneath the exaggerated surface of "Jeff Dean Facts", there is often a bit of truth. These intertwined true and false details just reflect Google's unique engineer culture.

From this perspective, "Jeff Dean Facts" can be roughly divided into two categories.

Just for fun, with the punchline being "exaggerated to the absurd"

Jeff Dean proved P = NP on a whiteboard.

Interpretation: P = NP is one of the most famous unsolved problems in computer science. This is a deification of computational thinking, similar to instantly mastering a peerless martial art just by taking a look in a martial - arts novel.

There is no Ctrl key on Jeff Dean's keyboard because Jeff Dean is always in control of everything.

Interpretation: This is an exaggerated statement about Jeff Dean's ability.

Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so forcefully that he shifted it to another computer.

Interpretation: It vividly depicts the concept of a distributed system in a way that violates physical laws, making people smile knowingly.

This kind of joke doesn't need to be taken seriously. They convey respect for the tech giants through absurd exaggeration.

"Sounds like the truth", a real portrait of engineering culture

When Jeff Dean went on vacation, Google's production services mysteriously stopped working for a few days.

Interpretation: An oral anecdote with a real prototype.

Many former Google engineers recalled that there was indeed a critical scheduled task (used to generate a debugging database for Protocol Buffers) running on a workstation under Jeff's desk.

This database was not officially recommended for production use, but because it was so convenient, it was relied on by many systems.

Later, when Jeff went on vacation, the production - access credentials of the workstation expired, the task was interrupted, and a chain of failures occurred, which is how the joke "took root".

When Jeff held a seminar at Stanford, the place was overcrowded, and even Turing Award winner Donald Knuth had to sit on the floor.

Interpretation: A verifiable fact.

According to the person involved's recollection on Hacker News and Jeff Dean's own confirmation: Knuth came in just before the lecture started, and there were no seats in the room (of course, it's also possible that someone gave up their seat).

On the one hand, it shows Jeff's influence in the academic and industrial circles. On the other hand, it presents the pure academic atmosphere in the tech circle where people are willing to sit on the floor to attend a lecture.

Jeff Dean has the Readability of binary code.

Interpretation: An oral anecdote and one of the jokes that best reflects Google's culture.

"Readability" is a code - review qualification within Google. Engineers need to prove their in - depth understanding of a language's style guidelines and best practices to obtain the Readability for that language and be authorized to approve others' submissions.

It is strict and scarce, and also an honor.

The joke about Jeff having "binary readability" means that he can not only read machine code but also review, write, and optimize it as if it were source code. This is a compliment to Jeff Dean's code - writing ability.

Behind "Jeff Dean Facts", engineers are expressing their respect for a legendary engineer in a geeky and insider way.

This may be the most romantic form of tribute in the tech world.

Reference materials:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46540498%20GitHub%20-%20LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts:%20A%20consolidated%20list%20of%20the%20Jeff%20Dean%20Facts!

This article is from the WeChat public account "New Intelligence Yuan". Author: New Intelligence Yuan. Republished by 36Kr with permission.