Google infrastructure outdated; no place for hackers, says ex-Googler

Ex-Googler who worked on Google's now retired project Wave termed the search engine giant's infrastructure as archaic.

eWeek quoted Dhanji R. Prasanna as stating that software running on Google's data centers is about 10 years old and was specifically designed to optimize search engines and crawlers.

Google has reportedly 36 data centers: 19 in the U.S., 12 in Europe and 3 in Asia.

Prasanna is credited with having worked on Google's search and indexing project and also on the now-defunct real-time collaboration tool Google Wave where he designed its real-time search front end and on installing APIs.

Google halted the Google Wave project citing lack of interest as the primary reason.

Prasanna who termed himself as unemployed hacker on Twitter, said: Protocol Buffers, BigTable and MapReduce are ancient, creaking dinosaurs compared to MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. And new projects like GWT, Closure and MegaStore are sluggish, overengineered Leviathans compared to fast, elegant tools like jQuery and mongoDB. Designed by engineers in a vacuum, rather than by developers who have need of tools.

He encapsulated his experience working at Google as: If you're a hacker, Google is not the ideal place for you.

The revelation just proves that Google is no longer the dominant force as it has been bypassed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

TechCrunch had reported in 2010 that Google had offered a mid-level developer about 15 percent raise over his $150,000 salary, quadruple the stock benefits and a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year and yet the engineer left for Facebook.