I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.
Mourning Google
11–20 of 485 posts
Re: Mourning Google
#12> I got a $90K bonus that year That's why they liked google.
Who knew psychological analysis was as easy as homing in on a sensational tidbit? Masterful stuff. /s
Re: Mourning Google
#13Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it (acknowledging I'm only one of nearly 150k employees) was basically IBM with better food.
Re: Mourning Google
#14My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…
I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money.
I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
Re: Mourning Google
#15"Psychopaths" seems to be a running theme in the various reminisces that people are sharing in comments here on Google stories.
Re: Mourning Google
#16I have a different theory about the cause of the decline.
Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.
It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.
Re: Mourning Google
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's moving from "paying the bills plus ..." to "paying the bills". Since the latter is _kinda_ important, it's difficult to let go when the "plus ..." part has left the building (and stopping that from happening is beyond the management level of most) - moreso, when there's no obvious place it went to that you could follow.
The plus was contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing that is Google. Google was - still is - a lot more responsible than most companies with that responsibility. But the risks are high and obvious. How good are these people at assessing this "plus"? I'd rather just be in it for the money if I were involved in Google. Being in it for the money is a respectable thing.
Not sure if people consider "contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing" a benefit based on which they choose their career preferences.
It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore.
On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.
Re: Mourning Google
#18Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was jealous of them. Then they always seemed to end up spending their time on Google+ or Play Store or some other application which was not as glamorous or interesting as you were expecting. It felt like a huge disconnect between the perception and reality. I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. I am glad though that these days people may judge the idea of a big-tech career more objectively.
Re: Mourning Google
#19>It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.
A pseudo-communist critique of Google.
>But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.
A nostalgia-driven critique of Google.
This post is a bit of a mess. There is valid criticism too, but it sounds like the author doesn't know exactly what he doesn't like about Google anymore.
I can also say I used to find better articles on HN but clearly the userbase of this website has changed, despite the guidelines trying to insist HN doesn't change and it's just a "semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills". No, HN is worse just like most of the tech space.
Re: Mourning Google
#20I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…
I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate.
But maybe it was just luck.