hope the other guys are not too mean to him.
are they mean to primadonnas at Google?
James Gosling joining Google
61–70 of 116 posts
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#62I once saw Gosling in an airport terminal waiting for a flight. He was consuming a large hot dog. I considered approaching him but decided to respect his privacy. When he finished his hot dog, he threw the messy wrapper directly onto the carpet. It was not a missed shot at the trash can, it was just blithely dropped on the floor. That's when I realized his work on automatic garbage collection had gone too far. I can'…
>Bjarne would have discarded his own trash properly.
if he able to remember what pockets he has them in and keep correct counts of his hotdogs and their wrappers, large hotdogs, baby hotdogs in large wrappers, eaten, half-eaten, saved for later ...
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#63When they say "Hire rockstars!", "Hire the best!", etc... This is what they mean. Note: I got _several_ down votes for this... wow...
There are probably five or six companies in the world that can actually hire "the best", the household names of the field. For everyone else, such hyperbole is not particularly helpful advice.
Also, rock stars rarely produce anything interesting after their brief peak. And you'd want to avoid hiring Ringo.
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#64Re: James Gosling joining Google
#65Re: James Gosling joining Google
#66Re: James Gosling joining Google
#67I expect we'll be seeing Google Emacs join the Apps suite.
Judging by Gosling's current code editor preference, I would be surprised if that were to happen. Apparently he uses Netbeans and vi for coding:
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#68This should be interesting for both James and Google. In the Chinese sense. More than a few of the original Java team ended up there. I suppose Google has probably 'reached out' (or is that 'reach around' :-) to avh as well.
The parts that are really interesting is the confluence of language design. Where is Guy Steele these days? At Sun there was a constant tension between Ousterhout(TCL). Java, and Self (wnj). Even in retrospect I don't know if it was a good tension or a bad tension. It made for some really interesting email threads.
I also wonder if they see it as a defensive move vis-a-vis recruiting since working with James would be a compelling reason to leave Google.
Given Google's current maturity (I mean they just figured out what managers do :-) and the change that happens in adolescent companies, I suspect it is a good time to join if you have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. There is the old joke "What would you do if you had a billion dollars and a dozen of the smartest engineers you ever met? Join Google and find out."
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual term for being paid to "not work" is called "being on the beach."
I've heard the term 'gardening timeout'.
It's called "garden leave" in the UK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave.
Re: James Gosling joining Google
#70One year almost to the day since he quit Sun/Oracle (see http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on ). That probably means he had a 1-year non-compete built into his employment agreement which he had to wait out (which makes me curious about what he could be working on at Google that could trigger that)
Even if there was a one-year non-compete, it could just as easily be that Google isn't working on anything that would trigger it and Gosling just decided to play safe and wait it out for a year. A year off break from work while you decide what to do next in your career sure sounds like a nice option, and the perfect amount of time to "regroup" like this.
The problem is that 'trigger it' means a judge decides that oracle "a computer company" and google "a computer company" are in the same business.
Or simply that it wasn't worth the risk. Gosling is being hired to give Google Java-cred it's not like they were waiting for him in order to ship a product