Jeff Dean Anecdote: Dug into Assembly to Fix Bugs, Advises Switching Projects Every 3 Years
AndrewDai · x · 2026-08-08
The author shares an anecdote about AI legend Jeff Dean: during the pre-TensorFlow async training days, the team was investigating slow parameter updates. While a typical engineer would only read C++ code, Jeff Dean dug all the way into the assembly code and found extraneous memory load/lock instructions.
Additionally, Jeff Dean offered a piece of career advice: do not spend more than 3 years on a single project. Keep changing projects to ensure continuous learning.
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