191–200 of 255 posts
Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges…
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Google is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.
That certainly isn't true of youtube. It, exclusively, holds a lot of videos. It's not like I can just watch random youtuber on vimeo or some kind of gnutube.
It's not enough to fully switch, but at the very least I get their stuff without mis-gendered advertising — as seen the other day on YouTube, where I was presented with an unskippable ad for sanitary pads.
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I would be willing to pay based on usage. But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.
> But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour. I don’t know how you can decry video streaming and advertising as destroying the planet and thus hating one of the companies that provide these services YET you use it.
I recently left a job at a very different large company with a similar timeframe (a little under ten years). Pretty much everything this author states is related to my experience. There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.
I've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company? I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.
I've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company? I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.
Yes, absolutely. The privacy enforcement infrastructure at Google is superlative.
Light on details and mostly seems to revolve around money.
When I worked at Google I immediately sold my stock and diversified. In hindsight that "cost" me at least $2MM. At a subsequent employer I held the stock, determined not to make the same mistake again. That "cost" me nearly $100k before I realized that the new employer's stock was not going to do what GOOG did. Anyway, congratulations to those Googlers who "picked" GOOG by not selling their GSUs and who made out like…
I'm pretty sure the luck of being born with sufficient intelligence to work at Google is orders of magnitude greater than the luck of making big ROI on Google stock.
> because you followed sound financial advice
Most financial advice is there to help the clueless masses to not lose their savings to get-rich-quick schemes and then default on their debt during their next unemployment period. Anyone smart enough to do Silicon Valley work has probably outgrown those training wheels and can think for themselves when investing.
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This is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible. I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.
REALLY? Japanese companies are an example of non-hierarchical culture with distributed decision making?
Sometimes you'd have people delegated out of one division/subcompany to provide help elsewhere - personally experienced this when we needed a PostgreSQL expert on a project where we subcontracted/bodyshopped for one of those subcompanies, and the headquarters delegated a postgresql core team member from japan, including having him visit for a time.
But day to day the decisions were local - the most feudal thing was that we knew one team (~50% of the company that was our direct client) was the most important one and that it's lead had actually more power than CEO - the specific division was essentially a way to park his independent team so he didn't have to deal with administrative overhead.
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Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's po…
"kill" is not a good metaphor in tech/markets, because established things and companies actually goes away. "Dethrone" is better, as the newer thing at some point becomes equal, and then dominant. But the old still exists, potentially staying in terms of absolute market value, but minority in terms of relative market value. During the lifetime of Google: mobile has dethroned PC, video streaming has dethroned TV, SaaS…