181–190 of 214 posts
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That seems like a low estimate of the cost of a senior SWE at Google. They probably earn at least 400k in cash + bonus + stock, and there are employer costs beyond that (office space, benefits, payroll taxes).
Glassdoor has avg total comp for senior swes at google at 193k...
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> The main reason why this won't work is that majority of public simply prefers free ad-infested services over paid ad-free ones. Counterpoint: Apple, one of the most profitable companies. People have been giving their money to Apple before they even flaunted a strong pro-privacy stance, and I have yet to see an ad from Apple that I did not opt in for (although their recent Apple Pay emails have been slightly annoyin…
Please, people don’t buy apple stuff because apple cares for privacy. People buy apple because its products are top notch quality wise.
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> Have you worked for a FAANG? I was at Google for 5.5 years and was the beneficiary of an engineer-retention project for a year of that. I'm now working on a startup. Think of it from the company's perspective: they have an engineer who has already been "paid off" in the sense of having generated more revenue for the company than they are likely to get in salary during a lifetime, and is likely independently wealthy…
There's more: Cos and the open source Vanadium, John Hanke and Ingress/FieldTrip, Niniane and Lively, Hartmut and the quantum lab, Craig N-M and google.org, etc. But you left out the largest retention side project: Jeff Dean and Brain.
> "The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising an…
Sure, don't they make >95% of all google profits.
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> The ad team prevailed, this person said. Of course they did. A controversial idea, but you know how much easier this would be for everyone if Google offered an option for users to be paid for volunteering your information to them? It's a precedent most fledgling ad companies wouldn't be able to match... even if it's just a few dollars a month, or maybe 30ish bucks a year. It'd cut into Google's bottom line, but it…
I’ve got a better idea. Google could always ship a product that people are willing to pay enough for where it is a sustainable business without being as supported.
Except that is an awful idea.
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I’ve got a better idea. Google could always ship a product that people are willing to pay enough for where it is a sustainable business without being as supported.
> I’ve got a better idea. Except that is an awful idea.
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$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose. Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to y…
> $50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. See my comment to nnq. You can't just take "100 of your best engineers", and stick them on some bogus project that regularly gets raided for its best talent by hiring managers. If they'd rather work on a bogus project than on a real product, they're not very useful engineers. The project…
Consider the project mentioned in the article. Sure, it will cost millions of dollars to develop. But OSes are in high demand, existing OSes have quite a few sore points, and plenty of people have made money selling operating systems or devices that need a custom operating system (MS/DOS, Windows, iOS, etc.) So it is not categorically insane from a business or engineering perspective to say "hey, we're going to invest in the development of a new operating system that will change the world."
On the other hand, maybe all the OS world needs are some patches on top of Linux to smooth over the rough spots.
People that see the project the first way will say they're working on a "moonshot". People that see the project the second way will say they're working on a "senior engineer retention project."
Any big company will likely want to hedge its bets, and indeed... apparently Google has people working on a new OS, and they obviously have people patching the Linux kernel (Android). No matter which approach ends up being correct, Google makes money. I don't think the investors are going to be filing many criminal charges against the board.
Back to the retention aspect, remember what the downside is in this scenario. The people that want to build their own OS to change the world or whatever just leave and go do it. They have money and can probably rope in some investors. If they end up being right about the approach... there is no more Android and that means no more Google ads on mobile phones, no more location history, no more searches... etc. That is quite a downside for Google. So even though the project is "this seems crazy, but we don't want these people to quit", it's 100% the right financial decision.
I think the shareholders can appreciate that.
That said, as an employee... this was all a little too much for me when I was at Google. No matter what you worked on, there was always a competing project with twice as much headcount and 1/10th the users. You would have a meeting with them along the lines of "hey, this thing you're assembling a 30 person team for... my team already made and it's in production and working." They would be like "nah, our use case is slightly different and rather than editing 1 line of code and getting no promotion, I'd like to build a HUGE team and put an EZ promotion packet together." Not for me.
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Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled. At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - h…
> Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled. And they all got canceled once their business case became void. None of these were bogus projects. They all initially had a business case, and were run by engineers who proved themselves before. When that business case fail to pan o…
Are you a voting shareholder (class A or B)? If you have class C (no vote), they don't have to care. If you have class A (voting public) shares, which get 1/10 the vote of the class B (management) shares, your influence is incidental at best.
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Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled. At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - h…
I would not characterize fiber as having any notable impact on the country at large's internet speeds/caps.
Sure, it took a while after Google Fiber launched, but there was a lot of infrastructure to deploy. I'd argue Google had a hand in this.
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We would appreciate to see the worldwide numbers of those stats. Well, that wasn't the message being discussed at Google IO, specially at the ChromeOS sessions regarding usability.
Global tablet market share held by tablet vendors from 2nd quarter 2011 to 1st quarter 2018. Microsoft is no where to be found. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held...
From what I see here there are lots of Windows tablets to be had, from various vendors.
http://www.mediamarkt.de/de/category/_2in1-convertibles-5420...
https://www.saturn.de/de/category/_2-in-1-convertibles-46890...
Which are the ones actually on display when I go to those shops.