Python has been around since the early 90ies. (Or even late 80ies?) Of course it's a much better language today than it was back then --- e.g. it got lexical scoping.
It's top 1%, but quite under-impressive compared to how talented and impressive he actually is, which establishes the very low utility of resume evaluations.
I worked at a hedge fund and we rejected people with more impressive resumes, and it only takes about 6 interviews before you realize how low the correlation is between how someone looks on paper and how smart they actually are.
perhaps there's a quasi-inverse correlation ... e.g., superstars like sergey don't care about putting in a ton of time to polish up their resume and make it sound all fancy and stuff (they're busy building google in their dorm room), whereas people who are good (but not great) make all sorts of efforts to polish up their resume and look their best.
Getting first-author papers in both VLDB and ACM SIGMOD your second year as a grad student (which means they were probably submitted his first year) is phenomenal.
the two papers he got published were in VLDB and SIGMOD, which are the two top conferences in databases and data management ... even pre-google, this guy had cred!
It looks like a fairly standard Phd student resume to me. I don't really see much extra in it. Yes there are some published papers, but so have many Phd students. Regarding google success, I would say him studying the right subject and doing the right things (start a startup) mattered much more than his CV and interests.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadI hate to be one of those crazy predictors, but I wonder if Google will ever partner with Netflix on that topic. It seems like a good idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
I worked at a hedge fund and we rejected people with more impressive resumes, and it only takes about 6 interviews before you realize how low the correlation is between how someone looks on paper and how smart they actually are.