No one can go down in GitHub history relying on memes, except Google's brother-in-law.
Who could have imagined this, who could have.
The day that Jeff Dean would leave Google has finally come!
How surreal and sensational was this moment? Google's stock price once plunged by 5.4% in response, with trillions of market value vanishing in a blink, leaving widespread dismay, and all comments in the comment section shouted in unison: It's over, Google is really finished this time.
Of course, there are always new and honest people who have little idea of who Jeff Dean is, and do not know how this "brother-in-law" figure at Google could cause such a huge stir.
Because he is a Google legend, an OG guru in the programmer community, a person whose "miraculous deeds" have been compiled into a collection of jokes — note that it is a full collection, praised by generations of programmers as:
The GOAT.
The Legendary Jeff Dean
Why do I say Jeff Dean is already a god-level figure?
In the golden age of the internet, there were countless viral jokes about his miraculous feats. I casually sorted out a few for you to get a sense of it:
The bank card password of Jeff Dean is the last 4 digits of Pi.
Jeff Dean once bit a spider, and the spider mutated to gain superpowers, as well as C++ code review permissions.
There are only two keys on Jeff Dean's keyboard: 0 and 1.
Jeff doesn't need headphones. When he wants to listen to an MP3, he reads the binary content directly and decodes the audio in his mind.
When Jeff suffers from insomnia, he uses MapReduce to count sheep.
Donald Knuth sent his masterpiece *The Art of Computer Programming* to Google. Jeff Dean signed his name on it and mailed it back to Knuth.
When Jeff Dean held a seminar at Stanford, there were so many attendees that Turing Award winner Donald Knuth could only sit on the floor.
Jeff Dean mines Bitcoin with his brain.
……
It is exactly this figure who announced his departure from Google, and wrote an extremely long farewell letter.
There is one sentence in it that left a very deep impression on me.
Tomorrow will be my last day at Google, where I have worked for 27 years.
Watching Google grow from the initial 25 people to more than 190,000 people today, this is truly an amazing journey.
Yep, it is indeed an amazing journey.
Jeff Dean, Google's 30th employee, the owner of super binary code capability (just kidding).
During his 27 years of tenure, he almost single-handedly built the underlying technology stack that supports the operation of the global internet today.
If the two Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave Google its commercial soul, then Jeff Dean is the man who gave Google its physical form.
Many of Google's important early infrastructures were built brick by brick by Jeff, and many well-known open source projects today are also inspired by these works —
MapReduce: The pioneering work of big data distributed computing.
BigTable: The pioneer of columnar NoSQL databases.
Spanner: The world's first truly global-scale distributed relational database.
Protobuf / LevelDB: The highly efficient serialization framework and lightweight storage engine widely used in the industry.
Without him, Google might still only exist as a research paper to this day...
But do you think Jeff only works on infrastructure?
To be honest, for a huge company like Google, it has managed to hold on until now before showing the innovator's dilemma, largely because Jeff has been leading a special task force to blaze new trails on the technology front all these years.
When the deep learning wave arrived, while others were still waiting and watching, Jeff plunged straight into it, forcibly transforming a search company into an AI company:
Google Brain: Co-founded Google's deep learning research project in 2011, which first proved that machines can identify high-level concepts (such as "cat") through unsupervised learning.
TensorFlow: Led the development of the world's most influential open source deep learning framework.
TPU: Promoted the birth of Google's self-developed AI chip, which greatly improved global AI computing power.
Even Hinton was largely brought to Google by Jeff Dean...
In December 2012, Hinton held an "auction" with two of his students, planning to sell his startup as a whole.
You have to know, that was Hinton back in 2012! As soon as the news came out, Baidu, Google, and Microsoft all showed up, even DeepMind came to bid.
The bidding went wild, the price was pushed all the way to 44 million US dollars, Microsoft couldn't hold on anymore, leaving only Baidu and Google competing head to head.
Who could have thought that in the end, Hinton directly called off the auction and chose Google.
And this was exactly the magic power of Jeff Dean (just kidding).
The night before the auction, Jeff Dean and Google executives flew to Lake Tahoe specially, took Hinton to a steakhouse for dinner, and tried their best to persuade Hinton to join Google.
It later proved that this meal played a decisive role.
At the NeurIPS fireside chat in 2025, Hinton publicly stated in front of Jeff Dean:
I had already decided that Google would win before the auction.
The auction was just a formality.
Later in the era of large models, facing the double-sided attack from OpenAI and Anthropic, Jeff Dean once again stepped forward to lead the R&D of the Gemini series, helping Google turn the tide.
Unfortunately, it seems that there is no way out this time.
Gemini is now in a very awkward situation. If Gemini 3.5 Pro still can't make a splash, Google might really suffer a heavy fall in the large model era.
However, haters hold your horses!
This probably has little to do with Jeff Dean. I heard that after Google Brain and DeepMind merged, the control was handed over to Demis Hassabis, which made Jeff very disappointed, and he no longer interfered in the Gemini project.
Everyone thought Jeff was finally going to take it easy, enjoy his time at Google and wait for retirement.
Who could have imagined that — hey, Jeff's legend is not over yet.
At the age of 58, Jeff Dean left Google where he had stayed for 27 years, and plunged into the booming AI startup wave.
His new company is called Discovery Loop, with the mission of realizing the automation of machine learning, science and engineering.
Jeff Dean Can Fly!
However, all the stories mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg of Jeff's legendary life.
There are more records of Jeff's legendary stories in unofficial history (doge).
Once in early 2002, the index server crashed, and Jeff Dean manually answered user searches for two hours. The evaluation results showed that the search quality increased by 5 percentage points instead.
In a system where the highest job level was only level 10, Jeff Dean was promoted to level 11.
Google Search is just Jeff Dean's "newbie onboarding practice project".
Sanjay, Jeff's legendary partner, once asked Jeff if he could fit the entire internet into his brain. Because the cooling fan of the keyboard was too noisy, Jeff misheard the question and wrote a system called Mustang.
Jeff Dean also compiles and runs his code before submitting it, but this is only to check if there are bugs in the compiler and CPU.
Jeff Dean has read access to binary code.
Jeff Dean also has write access to binary code, plus punch card code permission.
When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, Google's global production environment services will crash for no reason within a few days.
When Google interviewed Jeff Dean, the interviewer asked: "What would happen if P=NP holds true?" Jeff replied: "P=0 or N=1." Before the interviewer finished laughing, Jeff had already checked Google's public certificates and wrote the private key on the whiteboard.
It's not that you explain your code to Jeff Dean, it's that Jeff Dean explains your code to you!
At the end of 2000, Jeff Dean's coding speed suddenly increased by 40 times, because he upgraded his keyboard to USB 2.0.
When Jeff Dean designs software, he directly types binary machine code by hand. He writes source code just for other programmers to "reference".
When God said "Let there be light", whoosh, Jeff Dean was right there doing Code Review.
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean.
Jeff Dean does not actually exist. He is actually an advanced AI created by Jeff Dean.
Because Jeff Dean once failed a Turing test: he correctly reported the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than a second!
When Jeff undergoes an ergonomic assessment, it is to protect his keyboard from being broken by typing too hard.
When Jeff Dean plays Connect Four, he only needs three moves to beat you. (Not that many, just kidding)
Jeff Dean invented BigTable because his resume was too big to fit in any other database.
The notch on the Apple logo was bitten by Jeff Dean.
When Jeff Dean's code has undefined behavior, a unicorn will come down stepping on a rainbow and distribute free ice cream to everyone.
Jeff can recite 20,000 digits of Pi in 5 hours. But actually he doesn't memorize it, he cheats by recalculating it on the spot every time with O(log n) space complexity.
Jeff Dean is still waiting for mathematicians to discover the joke he hid in Pi.
There is no Ctrl key on Jeff Dean's keyboard. Because Jeff Dean is always in control of everything.
Jeff Dean was born at 11:48 PM on December 31, 1969. He spent 12 minutes implementing the first timer in his life.
When Jeff Dean says Hello World, the world will reply Hello Jeff.
Google once had to move out of a data center because Jeff Dean accidentally compressed the index too hard, triggering a black hole.
The speed of light in a vacuum was originally only 35 miles per hour. Until Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics.
When Jeff Dean sends you a code review, it's because he thinks there is something in it that you should learn.
Jeff Dean invented MapReduce just to sort his fan mails.
Jeff Dean's calendar jumps directly from March 31 to April 2; no one can fool Jeff Dean on April Fools' Day.
Once Jeff Dean's computer was infected with a virus, the virus uninstalled itself after running for three seconds and left an apology letter.
When Google's servers go down, Jeff Dean will go to the machine room in person and restart them with his gaze.
Jeff Dean's DNA is not a double helix, but a B+ tree.
Google: Jeff Dean's side project.
When he heard that Jeff Dean's autobiography would be exclusive to a certain platform, Richard Stallman (father of free software) immediately bought a Kindle.
What, you are asking if all these stories are true?
Hold on, we haven't finished telling the last of Jeff's miraculous deeds.
When asked if these jokes about him are true, Jeff Dean replied: "111111".
The interviewer was completely confused.
Jeff said calmly:
Every single bit of them is true.
(doge)
One More Thing
What, you have another question?
Forget about whether they are true or not, where on earth did all these stories come from???
Congratulations, you have discovered the hidden menu in Jeff's miracle stories.
Here's what happened.
In 2008, Chuck Norris Facts was very popular on the internet, which refers to making up all kinds of absurd and exaggerated jokes about celebrities.
Coincidentally, there was an engineer named Kenton Varda at Google. He was greatly inspired after seeing this trend, and secretly built an anonymous website on Google's internal network with several colleagues, dedicated to collecting the Jeff Dean miracle stories made up by everyone.
Then, the website was launched on April 1st, April Fools' Day...
Kenton even forged an email and sent it to the entire company to promote the website. Google blew up instantly, engineers frantically submitted stories, and the jokes got more and more absurd.
And then what happened?
Of course Jeff Dean found out, and doxxed the creator thoroughly, hahaha.
Yes, Jeff Dean didn't go to the IT department, and didn't use administrative privileges. He chose to go through various internal system status pages and server logs of Google by himself.
After about one or two hours, he accurately located the culprit,