Live data from Hacker News

An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

twitter.com

241–250 of 365 posts

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#241

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…

> Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays? Atlassian.

Ugh have you ever USED Jira?

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a xoogler used to be something to put in your profile bio, and basically an instant hire if in your CV. Now it almost carries a stigma.

Man, I don't know, if you need some binary trees inverted on a whiteboard, they are still the go-to folks.

Can we stop with this meme? I've seen it now twice in this thread and across the boarder Google threads today.

The hiring process is this way for the entire industry. Multiple startups have failed trying to move it away from its current incarnation of technical phone screen -> technical on-site, where the majority of technical questions asked are data structures, algorithms, and system design based.

Implying that the people at Google are only good at whiteboard interviews, and not much else, in terms of both intelligence and technical ability is laughable. Google's influence on software engineering is broad and deep. Their papers moved the industry, their open source projects power the industry, their internal tools influence shifts in the industry.

There's something wrong with you when you let their signal / data gathering for their hiring process impair your ability to see what they contribute clearly, and what obviously works for them in terms of hiring able engineers.

Using this issue, which is clearly not related to engineering ability (it's a systemic management issue as far as I can tell), as a data point to demonstrate that their interview process is flawed, and that the engineers that made it through it aren't able says more about your own emotional state.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#243
post #239

Twitter threads suck so bad from a UX perspective. Long form “article” in a zillion tiny chunks with all the UI control cruft repeated over and over and over and over providing no value whatsoever. An enormous post, page, or article would be so much better. So over threads.

The UI is the least of the problems with this thread. The author is freely mixing cherry-picked statements quoted from google documents with statements made by the other side of a law suit. It looks like a pile of smoking guns but that’s because most of it is misleadingly attributed, intentionally.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#245

Best part for me: Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not. @MikeIsaac Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>

Why is that the best part? Isn’t that 100% the fault of WhatsApp and has more or less nothing at all to do with google?

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#246

Online advertising is enormous. Google's Exchange process processes 11bn online ad spaces / day. We can now understand the motivation behind Google's wish to move the whole internet ecosystem (QUIC, BBR, AMP et al) into a huge optimized and abstracted Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system. From the outside people will see this as something new, shiny and as an improvement (which it is!) but at the same time they'd profi…

Oh no, God forbid anyone would profit from faster software!

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#247
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get publicly dressed down? Legal agreements and extremely valuable employment contracts, most likely. My understanding is that some (most?) of the developers out there today are in it for the money. If someone promised you enough income to retire by age 31, and all you had to do was keep your mouth sh…

everybody in adtech is in it for the money! Nobody loves ads.

I actually do enjoy ads. Especially relevant and targeted ones. I enjoy finding out about new and interesting products related to my hobbies (music production).

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#248

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…

Unionize anywhere you work. That's the way not to feel bad.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#249

Collusion? Conspiracy theories? Etc.? All are completely irrelevant. Simply because even a proven absence of them creates a false sense of security. It doesn't make us any safer. It doesn't take nefarious off the table. Entities with common means and ends don't have to collude or conspire. Their shared means and ends will force them to gravitate together. Starlings are a great example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

That is it. Cheers!

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#250
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I don't know, if you need some binary trees inverted on a whiteboard, they are still the go-to folks.

Can we stop with this meme? I've seen it now twice in this thread and across the boarder Google threads today. The hiring process is this way for the entire industry. Multiple startups have failed trying to move it away from its current incarnation of technical phone screen -> technical on-site, where the majority of technical questions asked are data structures, algorithms, and system design based. Implying that the…

Binary trees during the hiring process for software engineers is not a part of the entire industry. I'd be surprised if it was even the majority. But it is prevalent, and posts pop up here regularly disparaging it.

Places lean into Google's way of doing things by default without demonstrating that it leads to positive outcomes _for their business_. Google themselves do it due to no small part to compensate for the pitfalls of getting as big as they have. Pointing out that what they do is ubiquitous and inherently optimal is conflating scale with success.

Post reply on HN