Why does Google want two map apps? Why not just integrate into Google Maps?
Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
491–500 of 840 posts
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#492I agree with almost every point Noam makes, but I feel he could have done a better job steelmanning the counterpoint. There are upsides of having managers not have the level of control over their reports' futures that they do at most companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.) There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish any…
No, political correctness creates a stranglehold on ideas, the very last thing those in SV need when they are regulating their own monopolies of ideas online.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about that. Was MS ever not filthy profitable? They are very successful with azure, was that started by balmer or nadella? People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is their customer.
Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies astray with short-term decision making at the expense of long-term relevance. Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead to that was arguably short-term thinking). Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that put them on a bad long term path. MS would have stayed alive for a while,…
Enterprises are the slowest to change of all and this is MS bread and butter. I completely disagree MS was ever close to becoming irrelevant. Silicon valley is in it's own little world. The rest of the planet is firmly a MS customer.
MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consum…
> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new…
Nadella I think brought focus on ideas and prioritization that complimented Ballmer's ideas. He doesn't need to launch new projects, but ensure they are managed into a place of relevance. In that regard, it really showcases the excellent people MSFT has in the chain and how they can help each other get to where they collectively want to go.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely anything and these companies exist forever.
This is something that was unknown to me until a few years ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week). Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up people ridiculing the typica…
Don't get complacent. I've been where you are, and when the party is over you're going to have a hell of a hangover unless you can ride that job to retirement. Relearning how to compete after a few years of coasting is brutal. I was just past 40 when my gravy train derailed. The slack years were fun but they went by fast. Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when the job is over.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall watching a news report as a teen about how things used to be pretty chill at Microsoft at its heyday. These days it doesn't seem to have a monopoly on much of anything, but it can still crank out interesting projects. It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.
Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consum…
I really hate this narrative that Nadella came in and turned things around. He's absolutely made great decisions since taking the reins but most of his early success was just riding out things that Ballmer set in motion.
Not to mention most of Ballmer's misses were more Bill said no.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#497A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it.
For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose' at the company, so maybe that was a joke.
Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as impacted, but the discussion was quite serious.
Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this snack outage so seriously.
The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat channel was getting pretty heated.
Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole thing, which was sound advice in my opinion.
To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides' were to my eye roughly even.
I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as I best recall it.
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#498Interesting article all around. I have to raise one minor quibble with the author's points:
"No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing things."
If the author means in the sense of what a big company like Google is purchasing, that's kind of correct (though there's no guarantee the company sees it as in their best interest to keep that team or way of doing things together).
If the author means in terms of why a company like Google purchases another company... That's only one reason. Here's a short list of additional reasons I'm aware of Google has bought a company:
- To acquire the data (and agreements to share data) a company has built up over the years
- To acquire a company's customers (big in the ad space; traditional advertising is a trust network, and the easiest way to get into the inner circle of big client service is to buy someone who's already serving big clients)
- To remove a competitor from the field of companies in a space
- To acquire the team that built something Google wants to build fast (this is a gamble; Google's in-house, NIH-ist software stack is an absolute space alien, and teams that built something Google wants will likely have to rebuild it atop that stack while simultaneously limping along their existing tech stack that already does the thing but that Google has immediately labeled "DEPRECATED DO NOT EXPAND UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE WE DIDN'T BUILD THE KERNEL THIS IS RUNNING ON").
As an owner thinking of selling to Google, I have no idea if you know which of these they're thinking of your company as. But it's worth noting that many of those reasons don't imply your company will stick around as an independent coherent entity in Google (or even that Google intends to hire all your employees).
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#499While he has valid points of how corp life is different from startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for. General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensiv…
He seems like the kind of CEO I would love to work for. It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well. Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.
Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have your own goals to worry about?
Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely anything and these companies exist forever.
This is something that was unknown to me until a few years ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week). Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up people ridiculing the typica…
Honest question from an eng working the last few decades at a FAANG and finding themselves burnt out to the point of panic attacks some mornings (e.g. "can I keep going at this pressure"; which has me laughing at least a little about the "FAANG is easy" sentiment elsewhere in the thread)
Where? How do I find jobs like this?
I get what the sister comment points out about long-term stagnation, but at the same time, I could desperately use a few years without a resume gap, but without a perpetual dagger hanging over my head.