Jeff Dean on Back-of-the-Envelope Math: The Habit That Tells If Big Ideas Work
dawnsongtweets · x · 2026-09-21
In a conversation series, Google's Jeff Dean shares a timeless engineering habit for judging whether an ambitious idea is feasible: back-of-the-envelope calculations and first-principles thinking.
- Ask: how long to process that much data? Can it be sent over the network? "Would that take 100 years? If it's 10 seconds, that's very different."
- The goal is mentally exploring approaches to understand a solution's shape — feasibility, bottlenecks — before building
- Dean says this is a trainable skill until the rules of thumb become part of how you think
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