I recently wrote about Theo of Golden, Allen Levi’s novel about a stranger who notices everyone in a small town. All the way through it I kept seeing my friend Luiz Barroso. One of the passages I highlighted explains why it’s taken me this long to write about him: “There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended.”

Luiz died in September 2023. He was 59. Apart from a line in the post about leaving Google, I haven’t written about him at all. This is my attempt.

The Datacenter as a Computer

Luiz André Barroso was a Brazilian computer scientist and one of the most consequential engineers most people have never heard of. He led the small team that rebuilt Google’s data centers so they behaved like a single machine. He and Urs Hölzle laid out the idea in The Datacenter as a Computer. That change shaped how much of the internet gets built. He won the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2020 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Failure Is an Option

I worked for Luiz for several years. Before Core, when he was running Google Maps infrastructure, an organization of about fifteen hundred people, I’d started a small project to build a maps augmented reality system. We didn’t know if it was possible. Luiz didn’t think it was possible at all, and he let a few of us work on it for a year anyway.

That was proportional scrutiny, one of his ideas I still use: spend your attention where the consequences are. A few people chasing a long shot didn’t carry the consequences of the big bets in his organization, so he let us run. In one of our one-on-ones, I told him I was worried we wouldn’t succeed. He told me, “Failure is an option.” It’s the reverse of the line everyone quotes from Apollo 13. He’d made the bet knowing it might not pay off, and he wanted me to know that he knew.

Later, when he was asked to build the Core organization, I became Core’s chief of staff. I held that job for two years, the first of them working directly for Luiz, and then I helped him create the role he moved into next. That’s where I learned how to think about large organizations.

The Days in Which I Wasted My Career

Luiz was also an artist. He played guitar nearly every day, at home and at the office, and brought it on every vacation. He photographed birds, and a framed picture of a hawk he gave me as a holiday gift hangs on my wall. The year he died, he released Before Bossa, an album of American jazz standards and Brazilian songs from before the bossa nova era.

He made chocolate, too, and roasted his own Brazilian coffee. At Christmas he’d bring little boxes of chocolate to the office and give them to people. Sometimes he’d give me a pound or two of lightly roasted Brazilian coffee, and I savored it.

When the third edition of his data center book came out, he gave me a signed copy. The inscription reads: “To my friend and partner in multiple Google adventures, in hopes that this will remind you of the days in which I wasted my career as an Engineer :-)”

He didn’t think his engineering was a waste. He knew exactly how much it mattered. The joke was about something he took seriously: a person should be more than their job. The guitar, the birds, the chocolate, and the friendships were the other half of a whole life, and he made room for them.

The Only Thing He Carried Was a Guitar

Luiz was one of the only executives I ever worked with who didn’t carry a laptop into meetings. He’d show up with his phone in his pocket, and it stayed there. He didn’t read email between speakers or skim his inbox during someone’s slides. He talked with his team. The only thing he tended to carry into a meeting room was a guitar.

Somehow he was also prompt with email. I knew him for years and never saw him with a computer, but his replies always came back fast. I still don’t know how he managed to be fully present all day and stay on top of his inbox.

After his death, Urs Hölzle said there are constant battles inside the company over what the future should look like. Luiz navigated them, he said, thanks to an endearing personality and his guitar. In a room full of smart, stubborn people, the person who’s actually listening is often the one who gets a decision to stick.

He brought the same attention everywhere. We traveled together a lot. One Saturday on a business trip to Zurich, we spent hours walking all over the city and along the lake. We ended up drinking beer in a park and talking. On another trip we went to Oktoberfest, decided the crowded tents weren’t for us, and found a smaller beer garden away from the main festivities. What I remember from both is his questions. He was interested in everything, and he asked about you because he wanted to know.

He was also the most fun person I’ve ever watched soccer with. During the 2018 World Cup we had TVs set up in the cafeteria of our Google Maps building, and Luiz made it to a lot of the games. Once I took him to a San Jose Earthquakes game, and the things he noticed were so typically Luiz. Someone would make a bad play and he’d say, “You see him, he’s looking at the coach to see if the coach saw his mistake.” Even at a soccer game, he was watching the people.

In the novel, Theo finds ninety-two pencil portraits on a coffeehouse wall and gives each one back to the person in it. Reading those scenes, I felt something catch in my chest, because Luiz did the same thing. The gifts were real, but they weren’t the main way he did it. He did it with time and attention. He listened fully. He was present. He saw you.

What Google Meant to Him

Luiz loved Google, and he loved what he thought it stood for. He’d come to Google from Digital Equipment Corporation, and he’d watched big technology companies decline as they grew and got acquired. DEC was the example he came back to most often. I think he felt a responsibility to help steer Google through its enormous growth, and to keep reminding the company what it meant to be itself.

His essays on engineering culture read to me as part of that work. In the latest edition of the data center book, his co-authors published a small collection of them. In The Eagle has Launched?, he argues that we celebrate the wrong moments. We throw parties for launches, when what matters is the landing: a product that measurably makes users happier, or a system that got simpler and more reliable. In the Roofshot Manifesto, he made the case for steady, mostly invisible 1.3x to 2x improvements. Stack enough of them and from far away it looks like a moonshot.

Both essays are about noticing work that’s easy to overlook. That’s a management problem as much as an engineering one, because what a leader recognizes is what a team learns to value. Luiz recognized the people everyone else walked past. In my review of Theo I told a story about telling a struggling engineer that their work mattered. I said I’d learned it from a boss who was also a close friend. That was Luiz.

Obvious in Foresight

Luiz was brilliant, and he was modest about it. He used to say that all he had was the ability to state the obvious. The catch was that things obvious to him in foresight were usually only obvious to the rest of us in hindsight. In Three Lessons from Three Decades in Engineering, he puts it as advice. Big, important problems tend to be easy to understand even when they’re hard to solve, so develop respect for the obvious.

Luck and the Help of Others

That same essay ends with a line I keep rereading. After listing the lessons of his career, he writes that he’s left out the effect of luck and the help of others. They had as much impact, he says, as any efforts of his own.

That’s one of the most decorated engineers of his generation saying he isn’t sure how much of it he can claim. I think about luck as a multiplier. Talent and preparation still have to be there, and success is still earned. But whether it comes out as a one or a ten depends on things nobody controls. People who see their own success like that tend to hold it loosely and give a lot of it away. Luiz was the most generous person I’ve known, and I think that’s where it came from.

That Last Summer

My mom died two months before Luiz did. When he heard, he reached out and offered to do anything I needed. We spent a morning at his house talking about my mom, and about his dad, who had died a few years earlier. Eventually we drifted into technology and work. He listened.

A few weeks before he died, he came to my house to play guitar. My son plays French horn and trumpet, and he brought his trumpet out and asked if he could join us. We put a few charts in front of him, and the two of them played old jazz standards together, Luiz on guitar and my son on trumpet. It’s one of my fondest memories of him.

At his memorial service we heard from many, many people who’d been close to him. We told stories and helped each other mourn a friend and mentor. The same things ran through the stories people told. Luiz listened, he was kind, and he was smart.

OM-01

When Luiz left Google Maps to build Core, we threw him a big goodbye party. I’d made him a guitar for it, had everyone on the team sign it, and covered the case in Google stickers. I’d built guitars in classes before, but this was the first one I made on my own, so I gave it the serial number OM-01. It’s the guitar in so many of the photographs of him playing.

After he died, his wife, Catherine, gave it back to me. It hangs within reach of my desk now. When I’m stuck on a hard problem, I take it down, play for a while, and ask myself what Luiz would do.

It’s been three years since my friend died. I still think about him every day.