Everything is a “No Evil Zone” when money flows freely.
Mourning Google
101–110 of 485 posts
Re: Mourning Google
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unifie…
As a non US person, I have a couple questions: * What is P&A tech? * How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
>How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.
They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.
Re: Mourning Google
#103I 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.
edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is. They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.
Can't they technically be supplemented to report their confidence level along with their output? Afaict there's ways to do it.
Re: Mourning Google
#104> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell
Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.
Re: Mourning Google
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unifie…
As a non US person, I have a couple questions: * What is P&A tech? * How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
>* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.
Re: Mourning Google
#106> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…
Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.
Re: Mourning Google
#107I 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…
Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, faile…
I guarantee you that for most flaws you find in the product, somebody knew about it and cared about it, but fixing it didn't make the chopping block for the release.
Re: Mourning Google
#108Big Tech can't be immune to human psychology and how we have organized ourselves to do work for hundreds of years. Any organization beyond some size starts to exhibit bureaucracy, politics, in-fighting, sociopaths, etc.
Would a different corporate structure have different outcomes? (i.e. not mimicking medieval fiefdom structures that allow peasants/individual contributors to make bank) I think if massive profits and growth are the goals then this will always be the way things go when those goals are achieved. Look at any other large corporation and you'll see the same things. In Big Tech the massive money one can make via stock/bonuses means the gas pedal is on the floor as the car speeds towards dysfunction.
Re: Mourning Google
#109I 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…
Absolutely agreed. The mythology of engineer driven innovation only applied to the brief birth of the web and even then it was more product vs programming, yt for example.
Re: Mourning Google
#110I 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.
I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air
Sure, but for now. ChatGPT results will also be enshitified, and since the cycle of everything is much faster now, it will take much less than 20 years.