A Day in the Life of a Google Engineer vs a Harvard Professor

From 2003 to 2010 Matt Welsh was a professor in the Computer Science department at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; in 2010 he joined Google as a senior engineer focusing on wide‑area network performance and robustness. Below is his translation of a typical day at Google compared with a typical day at Harvard.

Typical day at Google:

6:30 – Wake up, get son up, wash up, breakfast, walk the dog in the park.

8:30 – Commute to work, mostly by subway.

9:00 – Arrive at the office, enter six different passwords, check email, review the status of several deployment tasks across data centers, then continue yesterday’s work.

9:30‑10:15 – Start coding, add request handling to his system, debug until it works, write one or two unit tests, handle a change list, and grab three free cans of diet cola.

10:15‑11:00 – Switch to another project’s Git branch, review comments on code written by a colleague, address the issues, build a new version, retest, modify code, submit the updated change list, and respond to the review.

11:00‑11:30 – Switch Git branches again, refactor code for safety, then launch a three‑hour MapReduce job to generate log data for network‑latency analysis.

11:30‑12:00 – Quick video meeting with the Mountain View team.

12:00‑12:35 – Free lunch in the cafeteria, share a story about cracking an Apple IIgs in high school.

12:35‑14:00 – Return to desk, check email, monitor the MapReduce job (now mostly finished), respond to recent code‑review comments, submit code, merge and clean up branches, review the task list and decide next steps.

14:00‑15:00 – One‑hour video project meeting with teams in Cambridge, Mountain View, and elsewhere; during the meeting he checks the MapReduce status page and posts a couple of comments on Buzz.

15:00‑16:00 – Drink Red Bull, continue working; MapReduce finishes, generate result graphs, analyze discrepancies, write new code to produce another set of statistics, and prepare the code for a next MapReduce run.

16:00‑17:00 – "Whiskey Thursday": colleagues gather to drink Scotch whisky and play guitar.

17:00 – Pack up and go home.

17:30‑20:00 – Dinner and family time until his son goes to bed.

20:00‑bedtime – If there’s work to do, he does it; otherwise he drinks a cocktail.

Typical day at Harvard:

6:30 – Wake up, get son up, wash up, breakfast, walk the dog.

8:30 – Commute to the office (about 20 minutes, walking the dog).

9:00 – Arrive, check email, complain about the workload before the afternoon meeting.

9:15 – Start writing a grant proposal; after three minutes he spends the next 45 minutes browsing Engadget, Hacker News and Facebook.

10:00 – Recover from the browsing stupor and make progress on recommendation letters, mostly copying from previous letters.

11:00 – Look at the calendar, realize there is only one hour left for substantive work, reply to old emails, email the assistant to schedule more than three meetings for next week.

11:30 – Draft a budget, email support staff, try to advance the grant proposal, choose a title and full budget, still unsure of the project’s content.

12:00 – Walk the dog around campus for 20 minutes.

12:30 – Lunch at the law school cafeteria (expensive and not very tasty), eat alone at the office while browsing Engadget and Hacker News.

13:00 – First meeting of the day with a random person from a Taiwanese company, spending half an hour explaining his research project without compensation.

13:30 – Second meeting with a sophomore who wants to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Berkeley or MIT; Matt explains the low chances and is asked to write a recommendation letter.

14:00 – Prepare a half‑hour lecture by pulling last year’s slides and updating the year.

14:30‑16:00 – Teach about cache algorithms to about 70 sleepy undergraduates, using many PPT animations and a laser pointer; after the Q&A he vows to improve the slides for next year.

16:00‑16:10 – Hide in the office to calm down, drink Coke to stay hydrated.

16:10‑16:20 – Check email, browse Engadget, look at Facebook.

16:30‑17:00 – Final meeting of the day with two graduate students discussing a paper due in less than a week; they are optimistic, and Matt sketches ideas on a whiteboard.

17:00 – Walk the dog home, the best part of the day.

17:30 – Arrive home, immediately check the flood of emails from talks and meetings, send five new meeting requests to his assistant for next week.

17:45‑20:00 – Family dinner.

20:00‑late – Pretend to work by reviewing emails and tweaking slides for next week, then drink a cocktail and browse Engadget again.

Translation by 伯乐在线 – 黄利民 Original English source: Matt Welsh Translation link: http://blog.jobbole.com/419/