Google Maps is amazing.
If you think the world deserves some more innovation in the search space, email me at josh@sirch.org - we have a team (mostly ex-Meta/Twitter/Insta), an MVP, and early revenue.
Google was founded 25 years ago today
171–180 of 232 posts
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a Disneyland for nerds Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the hi…
Do any companies today still have this culture?
OpenAI seems like it from the outside.
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#173It's lasted longer than the Blockbuster did (original company)
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#174Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers. People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lot…
> a Disneyland for nerds Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the hi…
I joined google after self-interrupting my academic path. Later I realized that Matt Welsh was the guy who wrote the first Linux manual I ever had (https://www.mdw.la/papers/linux-getting-started.pdf) which was pretty much the gateway for me learning what I needed to to work at Google.
My goal in joining google was to treat it as academia and use my position there to return to a stronger position in academia. I didn't manage to do this, but I was a more productive researcher as a SWE at Google than I ever was working in academia.
For a while Google wasn't just disneyland for nerds- it was nerdtopia. It was the first place I worked that had more people who were more nerdy than me. At first that was great but eventually it got tiresome.
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#175Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers. People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lot…
Check out the movie AntiTrust from 2001 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
This showed the crazy perks before Google became the powerhouse.
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a Disneyland for nerds Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the hi…
Do any companies today still have this culture?
R&D in pharma/biotech can be like this. But there are fewer and fewer free-wheeling R&D groups in industry these days, probably because people saw Xerox PARC and thought it was a waste of money (a single invention at PARC paid for all of PARC).
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#177When Google later went public in 2004, Larry, Sergey, and Eric made a pact to work together on Google for the following 20 years. That's coming due soon in 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The food is designed to make you work late and law firms and consulting outfits will realise this too if they haven’t already.
Not at Google. The food is there because they have to spend all their money on something, or risk being singled out as a monopoly. That sounds conspiratorial, but it's really the only thing that makes sense to me.
How does spending money on whatever have anything to do with monopoly?
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#179Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers. People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lot…
As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.
Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today
#180When Google later went public in 2004, Larry, Sergey, and Eric made a pact to work together on Google for the following 20 years. That's coming due soon in 2024. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...
Didn't all three of them check out years ago?