Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?
No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.
I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
Culture Change at Google
231–240 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#232I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.
Which is the difference between a very small town (might have a Walmart!) and the entire population of Montgomery, AL.
With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#233[flagged]
Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.
Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days. One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become…
Youtube failed to become something big? I think you've lost yourself in your argument a bit.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.
This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.
Beau of The Fifth Column (Justin King) emphasizes ... states/countries don't have friends, they have interests. He delves into specific cases all the time and is one of the clearest-eyed political commentators out there.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.
Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives). They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties…
While I'm hesitant to give in to my inner cynic, the anecdote about walking into the local, on-site IT in the post about his first day at google linked in the first post, especially stood out in my mind. Someone's manning that walk-in station - do they have the same benefit as the engineers? Half of which allegedly have PhD's, mind you.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#237[flagged]
Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.
I consider anyone raising a child as their parents, I honestly could care less who's physical bodies were involved.
It's interesting to me that anyone raising a child wouldn't want to be considered a parent. Is the use of this term by request of people actually in this position, or wasn't created by third parties in an assumption that we shouldn't call them parents?
Caretaker and legal guardian have different and more specific meaning than parent. Those terms are needed to more clearly describe a person's situation and involvement with someone else. Again its interesting to me that one would prefer not to be called a parent when they have taken on the responsibility and roles of being a parent to a child.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#238There is pre IPO Google culture and post
Probably true for most public companies.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.
I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve.
What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...
* EA/Origin
* Epic
* Ubisoft
EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).
Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".
I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.