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Why I Left Google

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Re: Why I Left Google

#171

Post by zyfo »

vibrunazo wrote: post #119
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing evolutionary about "social signals". It's very, very old. Since the beginning of time advertising companies have used big data to better target their ads. Facebook obviously makes this easier, but it is not new. 20 years ago advertisers knew, within a margin of error, what type of car you drove, how much money you made, and whether your wife was pregnant. Social signals are less valuable than search t…

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not implying they need social signals to better target ads. But to give better search results. (as in google + your world) The competition was already doing this, Google was threatened. Bing had a deal with Facebook. Users were already using Facebook to look for information instead of Google. They tried to outsource social to facebook and twitter. That proved an un…

> Social is the future of search

Says who? The fact is that arguably the most hardcore googlers are here on HN, and I would imagine that most of us don't care for, and even dislike, social search.

That's not enough to prove that social isn't the future of search, but it's enough to think twice about it.

Re: Why I Left Google

#172

Post by jrockway »

xtracto wrote: post #152
jrockway wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are my thoughts as an engineer at Google. These are my own thoughts, not Google's :) I don't think Google is fighting for its life; people are not defecting away from search to use Facebook's search or Bing or whatever. Right now, Google+ is something like, "let's see what happens if we build a social component and integrate it with our products". It doesn't seem like much right now and it's certainly not killin…

> Rather than ensure that everything we push is an epic success on day one, we're putting it out there for people to try. Some people don't like Google+, some do. Oh, I got bitten by this before by Google. I was a heavy Google Notebooks user which used it until the last days. They stopped supporting it some time ago and now will be shut "anytime soon". The problem I see with a lot of the 20% projects (labs, or micros…

There are definitely cool things that end up shut down. All I can say is that it's an age-old problem: "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."

Re: Why I Left Google

#173

Post by jrockway »

michaelochurch wrote: post #165

To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't. Google has an immense amount of talent "under…

Currently, managers get in trouble if they deny you 20% time for more than one quarter. This seems reasonable and I've never heard of anyone (in my department) being denied even for one quarter. But you're right, there is a bit too much management in general.

The depressing part is that Google is so far ahead of everyone else that they can fuck up a lot of things and still be the best place to work by light years. (They even pay better than the investment banks now!)

I haven't done a Perf cycle yet, but the only problem I foresee is that nobody really knows what my job title is supposed to do. That hasn't stopped my coworkers from being promoted, though, so I can roll with it :)

Re: Why I Left Google

#174

Post by ippisl »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #56

As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote: "I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”"

Google released hangouts (it's group video chat) in mid january. it might be a feature teens would really like and one that facebook would have hard time to copy.

So it's probably too early to tell if teens will use google+.

Re: Why I Left Google

#175

Post by cletus »

michaelochurch wrote: post #165

To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't. Google has an immense amount of talent "under…

The problem with blog posts like this one is that they're largely ignored for their content. Instead, those with an agenda or an axe to grind (on either side) come out of the woodwork.

Your comment is a case in point. Anyone familiar with your story (at Google and, as you know, there are many of us who are) knows how totally skewed your perception is.

Many people (including me) tried to offer you constructive advice. Without getting into specifics I think it's fair to say that any problems you had were pretty much entirely of your own making.

Regarding a few specifics:

- You mischaracterize the slotting process, which is now largely gone anyway (and you should know this so I'm not sure why you're bring it up as if it were a present problem);

- I can't speak for how much time managers spend on Perf but managing their people and the careers of those people is kinda their job. As for engineers, it depends on how much feedback you need to do. One engineer I know how to do >20 feedbacks and this took him a couple of days. Generally speaking, the more you have to do it, the quicker you are (at each one);

The fact that performance is peer-driven is overall a good thing. It means your relationship with your peers matters and this isn't just an arbitrary managerial decision. I see you still don't get that.

Google isn't perfect. Then again, nothing is. But it's pretty great. Or, rather, it can be. You get as much out of it as you put in. See something that needs fixing? Then fix it. It's certainly not a place for those that simply like to sit back and complain.

Re: Why I Left Google

#176

Post by brudgers »

pvarangot wrote: post #53
brudgers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is unlikely to shut down MS Research. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx [edit] If I have my James Whittaker's straight, he worked at Microsoft before going to Google. If I don't, he probably didn't.

Google Research is alive and kicking: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html I think you mistook Google Labs with Google Research, Google Labs was sort of a playground for engineers more than a research division. Google Research is as serious as an academic division is inside a big company. I'm not in any way affiliated with any of both, though I know people who interned/work at both. In fact I would take Micros…

>"Google Research is alive and kicking:"

Alive, yes. Kicking?

I figured out what was bothering me about the comparison between Google Research and MS Research in light of the shutdown of Google Labs. The Google Research site is essentially a bibliography for academics, Microsoft Research site has papers, blogs, and downloads -- in true Microsoft tradition, it is a BLOB not an RDBMS table.

Microsoft Research is clearly reflects a hacker culture, Google's reflects a culture where the idea that labs are not necessary to research holds sway. Google Research reflects an approach more akin to the social science of sociology, than physics.

Re: Why I Left Google

#177

Post by mistermann »

laconian wrote: post #98
mistermann wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway. 100% agree. Two small decisions that enrage me for some reason: 1. Stealing the "+" operator away from searches 2. Making Google+ a (semi) closed platform - when I see a link on HN and I click through and it wants me to login to my google+ account just to view the article, I rage inside. I always want better search, and I've…

If you're enraged over relocating a "+" prefix to a double quoted word, then you might not want to use a post-2005 version of Microsoft Office...

Ha.....I agree with you on MS Office!

Re: Why I Left Google

#179

Post by talmand »

OpieCunningham wrote: post #32
talmand wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to be able to search the files on your computer from another computer over the internet using Google? If such a thing exists, what would you do with it? Are you willing to open your entire hard drive to Google to transfer the found files to the second computer? Really?

That wouldn't be necessary. The indexing service could reside on your computer with the "omnibar" able to access it to find results (either built into Chrome or via extensions to other browsers). But since Google would probably want to know the content of your documents to better target ads, the omnibar would eventually, probably, become the nightmare you speak of.

It would be necessary, why search for files on a second computer if you don't want access to those files? Unless the search is restricted to one folder then the whole hard drive is open to Google. I remember Google Desktop being similar to what he wants other than secondary computer access.

Re: Why I Left Google

#180

Post by ScottWhigham »

antirez wrote: post #41

IMHO what's sad is that Google+ is not better than Facebook for average people. Better is, for them, more warm, where you may express more about you in a simpler way, and so forth. Google+ is clearly designed by people not exactly in touch (mentally speaking) with the average person using Facebook, that's why nobody of the non tech guys want to switch to it. p.s. IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon a…

IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it.

The only thing that, for me, would cause Google to "lose in the email space soon" would be the exact thing you say they are good at: anti-spam. I've started getting more spam on gmail recently but it's now only 5 or so emails a week out of thousands. Think about how good that is and then ask the question, "If it was 0, would that inspire people to go through all of the hassle to switch emails?" I'd guess that the answer for most folks would be, "Meh - 5 spam messages a week for a free email service is fine. I'd rather not change."

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