111–120 of 520 posts
“The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else” I wish they had valued users above all else
There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.
Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving . This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time the…
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How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?
I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud. The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job. That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that expe…
My experience (5 startups) is that office politics are 100x more important in small startups. Everything is more concentrated, including the politics. That's why there is so much cofounder drama to go around.
At least in a big company there's a lot of inertia and process to tone down the politics a little bit.
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I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their…
He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.
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> Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares? So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?
Noogler - new googler. not “never googler”.
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Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on G…
> Code at Google3 is one giant monolith I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo. Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there…
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My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.
What alternatives do you recommend for email? That's my one google service I have difficulty getting away from.
Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?
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I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI. Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea…
I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that t…
Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you st…
_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.