171–180 of 290 posts
Turns out adult supervision wasn't all bad. I remember some time ago, probably 2002-2003 (?) when Bill Gates said something along the lines of "every tech company goes through a period of love at the beginning, and then that love turns to resentment; Google is in the middle of their "love" period and Microsoft is way past it; but that will change". And, like a newly wed, I remember thinking: nah, that can't change. M…
Made me laugh, thanks!
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substanti…
Is it a big deal to me that Google messed up their automated AdSense "publisher" interaction script, and cut off my income for a few weeks? Why yes, yes it is... but that doesn't mean that anyone else cares about that. Even if Google's generally poor supplier relations affects a lot of people (and it does), there's never enough of them for it to affect Google, the brand.
Same goes for any number of other Google problems. Did the "nym wars" cause lots of disaffection amongst Google users? Yes, but again not enough. Did adding lots of pointless JavaScript to search results pages piss off a lot of people? How about the fact that search results are much less specific/useful than they used to be? Unilateral changes to the privacy policy? Or Google Reader? Code Search? Etcetera, etcetera...
Google have created a huge amount of simmering resentment over the last few years. So, once an issue like this starts to get some traction, there are a lot of people ready to wait in line to put the boot in.
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Imo. The difference is the control Steve had over the company when he was alive. At Google, despite how well run the company is, you really do not know the direction or vision for the company although everything _seems_ really cool. Where as at Apple, the idea is you were sacrificing in order to help Steve achieve _his_ vision.
Been at Apple and at Google. Googlers annoy me endlessly because everyone knows the mission and everyone thinks they're on the same mission. Even if their job is indirectly related or even if what they're doing is potentially evil. They all believe they are changing the world. It's what they tell their aging hippie parents when they visit, it's what they brainwash the legions of school children that visit, it's what…
I see this general pomposity among my fellow techies all the time. Some think that business people are stupid, some think humanities are unnecessary, some argue that users are all noobs etc...
Perhaps it's pride in work/abilities gone too far. Perhaps we overvalue ourselves...
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What does all this say about Larry Page? He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research. From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness. Reminds…
Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substanti…
> Google-hate of late It's just gotten hip of late. The lack of faith institutions is accelerating, almost as if by design.
Profit driven corporations are not that.
Less faith in corporations would probably have very few disbenefits. Less faith in the legal system leads to people taking 'justice' into their own hands. Less faith in the political system leads to people becoming disengaged, threatening the legitimacy of government.
“The profit-driven corporate person, in other words, acts just like a natural person with Antisocial Personality Disorder, commonly called a sociopath or psychopath. ”
http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diag...
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100 and 120, at least in my brief experience. Coworkers start expecting 100% output from you, which means you are going to get a lesser review for putting out 80%. That they don't let you do 20% in the first 6 months there is what makes it so hard to start it back up.
This is hackable if you're strategic about it. The trick is to always make sure your coworkers are unblocked . If someone needs a code review, do it before your regular work. If someone's waiting on an e-mail response from you, send it first. If someone needs your CL to be in before they can proceed, make sure you get it in. Then once everybody is unblocked, your time is yours. On a well-functioning team you still ne…
What the what?
I don't agree with the article. I feel the main issue with google is its laziness. No more legacy internet explorer support, imposing a bad google + whereas make it better...
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What does all this say about Larry Page? He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research. From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness. Reminds…
Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
There's something deeper here - Larry Page is thinking in terms of "big data" - "wouldn't it be nice if we could run all kinds of multivariate analyses on everything about everyone?" - but it's fundamentally impossible to do that while preserving anonymity. The same information that might reveal interesting correlations is vulnerable to correlation attacks. Say you wanted to know how nutrition affected immune system response. You'd look at things like height, weight, diet, frequency of minor illness, and rough location (city level, to control illness rate against those around you). To be of any use, the "anonymized" database is going to have to have all those variables correlated per person, which means if I know you're 6'1", eat a lot of bananas, live in Silicon Valley and had a cold last year, I can potentially look you up and find out other things about you.
It's worth remembering that whenever a high-level Googler talks about the social/medical potential of large-scale data analysis like that, that it is inherently hostile to privacy.
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"The company provides, so much, for you, for your family. You wouldn't to ever lose what you have now gotten used to, for yourself, for your family" Ah, the infamous golden cage At times like this I'm so glad I didn't join Google. And by join I mean I wasn't approved in their dysfunctional interview system.
We all live in cages, all that varies is how golden they are and how big they are.
Because if the cage has the area of Earth, then it might as well not exist at all.
And if it's not gold at all, then you don't have any remorse trying to leave it behind (which is what "golden cage" conveys).
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substanti…
People don't like change. People like what they had. People hate that Google is deciding to move forward. Now forcing the changes on their user base so that Google doesn't have an unlimited number of different things to maintain.