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Google was founded 25 years ago today

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Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How senior do you have to be generally to get your own bonafide private office?

I don't think I ever saw one. The director of the product I worked on (comprising a few hundred people spread across a few offices and countries) sat a few "pods" over from me for awhile. He did have priority use of a 1:1 meeting room though.

I'm fairly certain I've seen pictures of at least one corner office though, on Google's campus in Mountain View.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I ever saw one. The director of the product I worked on (comprising a few hundred people spread across a few offices and countries) sat a few "pods" over from me for awhile. He did have priority use of a 1:1 meeting room though.

I'm fairly certain I've seen pictures of at least one corner office though, on Google's campus in Mountain View.

Very possible! I only went there once, and only went into a couple cafes in the main buildings.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#223
post #164
post #99

Without 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…

> 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 lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but…

There were certainly some bare-bones companies earlier in my career, but there were also some - Thinking Machines comes readily to mind - that were pretty famous for pampering employees like this. Also, even at the bare-bones companies, people got offices or at least cubes. Of twelve employers in my 30-year career, only two had open offices and less than half of the rest involved sharing with one other. In 2000 I was in the middle of a four-year stint alone in an office with walls, which seems almost unheard-of now. It wasn't until I started WFH full time (2014 I think) that I was able to recapture that experience.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#224
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but…

There were certainly some bare-bones companies earlier in my career, but there were also some - Thinking Machines comes readily to mind - that were pretty famous for pampering employees like this. Also, even at the bare-bones companies, people got offices or at least cubes. Of twelve employers in my 30-year career, only two had open offices and less than half of the rest involved sharing with one other. In 2000 I was…

How would you rate it? How does it affect your productivity? Collaboration, any influence? :)

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were certainly some bare-bones companies earlier in my career, but there were also some - Thinking Machines comes readily to mind - that were pretty famous for pampering employees like this. Also, even at the bare-bones companies, people got offices or at least cubes. Of twelve employers in my 30-year career, only two had open offices and less than half of the rest involved sharing with one other. In 2000 I was…

How would you rate it? How does it affect your productivity? Collaboration, any influence? :)

Huge productivity enhancer. You can always collaborate with someone either over the net or by just walking over and talking in the same office.

While in open plan you're always "collaborating" with everyone within earshot (I also get distracted by people moving around behind my screen).

There's a reason why open plan was mostly abandoned in the 60s, an no good (non short-sighted) reason why it was resurrected in the '00s.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#226
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you rate it? How does it affect your productivity? Collaboration, any influence? :)

Huge productivity enhancer. You can always collaborate with someone either over the net or by just walking over and talking in the same office. While in open plan you're always "collaborating" with everyone within earshot (I also get distracted by people moving around behind my screen). There's a reason why open plan was mostly abandoned in the 60s, an no good (non short-sighted) reason why it was resurrected in the…

What was the actual reasoning? Like, Zuck is a survivor and genius I respect (he's not perfect tho obviously)...but why does he do open plan at FB? Why did any of the tech companies do open plan? Are they thinking about it? Do they measure it? What's the rationale?

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. In fairness the offices generally have many quiet spaces to escape to, if you are ok working on a laptop.

How senior do you have to be generally to get your own bonafide private office?

From what I can tell there isn't any company wide rules. In my building there are directors who sit out in the open, some who have private offices.

Some non manager software engineers share offices with one or two people, and some managers share an office with someone.

Sounds like if an employee really really wants an office, they can be eligible to share one, but it's not the norm. It's actually pretty quiet though in the "cubes" since there are so many meeting rooms to pop into for discussions.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#228

Earlier 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?

I recently joined and was shocked how much freedom they give senior engineers. It's really different than most big companies.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#229
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would trade in these shitty open offices for the cube farm from Office Space though…

haha I have thought about this. I saw office Space right before I got my first coding job. So I expected the lifestyle of the typical engineer to be in line with the 'drive an old car, live in a small apartment' representation in the movie.

Twenty something years later never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd have insane compensation and perks and yet an even shittier desk situation than depicted in that movie lol.

Re: Google was founded 25 years ago today

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results are displayed on the page, just a little bit below the ads.

If you have to scroll, they are not displayed. You seem to have a working definition of "display" which does not include making something visible, but that conflicts with every actual definition of the term.

That depends on the size of the screen then? On my 15" laptop screen if I google "buy s23", I see both ads and non-ads without scrolling.
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