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Google Internal Comics

goomics.net

161–170 of 227 posts

Re: Google Internal Comics

#161
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People with 3 kids make do with jobs at Walmart and McD. Very difficult in the Bay Area given the housing costs. I guess it's possible if you lucked into a below market rate apartment and qualify for government assistance like Medicaid and food stamps.

You are saying that all Walmarts and McDs in the Bay Area are staffed with people who have a 3 hour commute?

'BAY AREA LEADS NATION IN COMMUTERS TRAVELING AT LEAST 3 HOURS EVERY DAY, STUDY SAYS' https://abc7news.com/super-commuters-bay-area-traffic-3-hour...

Re: Google Internal Comics

#162
https://goomics.net/17/

> Size of the pool of candidates for a position at Google

Yea, no. It's kind of funny that the image of the world is centered at North America. That's how I feel about Google (and a lot of other big tech) hiring practices.

I'm not saying you can't work for Google from the UK, Germany, India, or other places, but it gets a lot harder.

Re: Google Internal Comics

#164
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any human organization that is not making the world worse in one way or another? Its pretty much relative in any case, hardly purely evil or purely good unless you are very naive or very young.

Or if you’re very Apple. They didn’t start out as that organization per se, but there’s lots of things to be said about how they’re committing to being at least carbon neutral to the planet over the whole lifecycle of their products. They set 2030 as that goal, but I believe they’ll get there much earlier than that. Google just went from one extreme to the other, and it’s seen by many as driven by a focus on Ads. Edi…

The assertion was that companies aren't unequivocally good. Apple are better than most, but still support Foxconn and terrible factory conditions, use their ecosystem to crush open competitors, and push planned obsolescence via software updates.

Re: Google Internal Comics

#166
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that other stuff is a loss leader for selling ads.

Sorry, but that's not correct. As a counterexample, Google Cloud is not a "loss leader for ads". The hardware division is not a loss leader for ads. There are a myriad of counterexamples. A loss leader is a product which is used to acquire revenue through a different channel, such as game consoles which often sell at a loss on hardware to encourage game sales.

There is a comic for that too.

https://goomics.net/70/

Re: Google Internal Comics

#168
post #13

I'm not saying this with the intent of harshly criticizing the author, but I admit it's surprising to me that someone (who had other options) would work for 14 years at a company they clearly came to believe was making the world a worse place.

I think Google has a culture problem (they're massive, doesn't apply everywhere, etc. etc.). There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand…

>yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things

>Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if tthey're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.

Does the existence of people worse off than you eliminate your right to complain?

It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying. If you're coddled (by some metric) you should... shut up?

Re: Google Internal Comics

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Opinions are my own) An alternate way of looking at it: When you work at a place you can help influence the culture to move it in the right direction. When you aren't working there you can't .

If you are good, the best thing you can do is go leave and go work for a company doing things a better way. If you are not good the best thing you can do is stay and incrementally dilute their talent pool. If you actually want to have more impact than that as an IC you could try your hand at internal activism, but I'd say you have a dramatically higher chance of damaging your career than creating any real change at a…

Internal activism has demonstrably achieved a noticeable amount in steering the company to act a bit more morally.

As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).

Interestingly every time this topic crops up there's a chorus of "just quit if you feel that way about it" as if the exact opposite was true although in reality I think everybody kind of knows it's really not.

From a non American perspective it's really strange watching this play out. Like looking at a culture that cant see the color blue or something.

Re: Google Internal Comics

#170
They are great! But some (most?) could really benefit from a creation date/year being visible, especially when referencing years that are made out to be "far in the future" but are in the past now
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