Ask HN: Gmail account security

Google's a great if you want a high standard of living and being pampered. Not the highest pay, but it's more relaxed.

Also if you have a PhD. Google could be a research playground for you.

Everyone at Google is or appears nice. I had a slightly mean team lead at Google once, but he's been always my favorite. Highly technical, no BS, little patience when I wasn't hyper focused. One of my coworkers at Amazon weren't nice, and just confronted me with feedback that I should show up exactly at 9A.M. I appreciate having honest and direct feedback like this, and this is where I grew the most. I don't think I ever received negative feedback at Google, even though I probably should have. Some people prefer environments where everyone is perfectly nice and happy all the time. I think I would like Google more if we didn't sugar-coat things. That would prune products and people who are deadweight, even if that possibly means me. I respect the Finance industry to the degree that they do not mask their profit motive.

> It also sounds like your manager had something to do with it.

Of course. People leave managers, not companies. That said, the managers are part of a system. I did shop around for other teams before I left, but they were all boilerplate CRUD work. CRUD work's also fine, but the value of these projects to users was not clear to me.

> Perhaps it was a lack of promotion?

I'd say that is a symptom, not the cause. It's about being appreciated and having your work understood.

> do you have an opinion on why protocol buffers aren’t more widely adopted than json?

I think some people dwell on the performance difference. I think adoption boils down to ergonomics, ease of use, and tooling. Within Google, there has been significant investment in internal tools/libraries around Protobuf especially Java. For something like Protobuf, it's not broken, why fix it? People at Google are familiar with Protobuf. The outside world is familiar with JSON. When I was at Google, I launched a gRPC/Protobuf API but our clients had significant hardship onboarding. I think this is within the theme of externalized Google tech being inferior to the internal version solely from the aspect of ease-of-use/documentation.

Until TypeScript came around, I think an argument can be made against JSON as lacking type safety. I used TypeScript when it was still in Beta and felt Google was reluctant to this. It doesn't help that TypeScript was pioneered by MicroSoft. To be fair, at the time people didn't trust Microsoft. I mean, people were trusting Chrome more than IE for good reason. Once people actually give TypeScript, I think it's a no brainer

Because email addresses are practically a requirement to function in society, I think they should be a public service. Everyone should have the right to get an email address controlled by a public service institution which guarantees you that you can move between service providers as you please. There could even be a standardized protocol that service providers could use to easily update DNS entries when the user requests a move, assuming that you can identify yourself via some other means.