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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#131
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$270k in the Bay Area is not retirement at 25 money unless you’re that Googler living in a van in the parking lot, or your retirement plan is living simply in a poor country. It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc. and the American healthcare system alone means you need to have millions saved as a buffer against illness over that kind of timeframe (kinda hard to re-enter the workforce at 40 with cancer when you realize your cost projections were optimistic).

Re: Mourning Google

#132
I thought the non-evil phase of Google is commonly viewed to be considerably earlier, sometime before Gmail (2004). While the article mentions 2010 as still being in it. I wonder whether by 2040 somebody will lament the good old Google of 2024.

Re: Mourning Google

#134
post #37

> "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.

"psychotic" is being thrown around as the new "narcissist".

Basically anyone with some personality trait that I don't agree with is now a "psychotic".

Re: Mourning Google

#135

> 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…

trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus

Re: Mourning Google

#136
post #34

I 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…

Chrome? Chrome OS? Google Docs? Those haven't been successes?

They were inevitable even my granny would have made those decisions.

Re: Mourning Google

#137
His take on Google's search is spot-on. It's not totally useless but it no longer stands apart from everything else. Who in 2010 would have predicted that?

Re: Mourning Google

#138
I remember the day I decided to switch from Yahoo to Google, finally I could find relevant things on the internet. It was in 2001 iirc. At the time I really thought Google will never become the corporate mess it is now, it felt like a cool company.

Re: Mourning Google

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.

Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl... .

Openai's entire business model and product offerings are based on theft. Google's no saint, but the scale and scope are rather different. Furthermore, openai's shills spamming forums to defend the practice is unseen in intensity.

Re: Mourning Google

#140

I thought the non-evil phase of Google is commonly viewed to be considerably earlier, sometime before Gmail (2004). While the article mentions 2010 as still being in it. I wonder whether by 2040 somebody will lament the good old Google of 2024.

I guess we are talking about the time before they literally scraped it from their mission statement?
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