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I just want to serve 5 terabytes.

Benjamin Staffin · 225.2K views · 2021-11-02 · 3:33

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Overview

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

On Hacker News

Used as a shorthand joke for Google-scale bureaucracy and the difficulty of simple tasks at large companies.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

Topics

Satire & parodyCloud, DevOps & reliabilityManagement, leadership & organizations
Search by tags
googlesatireinfrastructurebureaucracybroccoli man

What people said

nostrademons · 2024-07 · Recommendation

Ha ha ha. Have you seen the Broccoli Man short? And that was a satire of what Google's infrastructure looked like in 2010 . [VIDEO]

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anymouse123456 · 2026-01 · Joke / meme

My other favorite internal internal meme from that era was the Broccoli Man video, "I just want to serve 5 Terabytes." [VIDEO]

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kevindamm · 2025-12 · Joke / meme

Broccoli Man! classic [VIDEO] (2010) To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen

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Sources

Video by Benjamin Staffin, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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