Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Culture Change at Google
261–270 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do we have to change our language (and behaviour) for the edge cases? Is a grandparent who raises their grandchildren offended by the word parent? I doubt it. What’s the point?
The only people experiencing offense here seem to be the ones who don't like the term child raiser for some reason.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but if there's a pushback on a change, that's defense, not offence.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#263[flagged]
My parents are parents but not child raisers anymore. I have friends who are child raisers but not biological parents. The main point is whether you are a primary carer for a child below school age.
If you're a primary carer and you're below school age you have bigger problems.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do we have to change our language (and behaviour) for the edge cases? Is a grandparent who raises their grandchildren offended by the word parent? I doubt it. What’s the point?
The only people experiencing offense here seem to be the ones who don't like the term child raiser for some reason.
> people experiencing offense
You mean, the "offended ones"?
Re: Culture Change at Google
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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. Child-raiser is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say child-raisers we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#266There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…
The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.
It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s a person who commutes from Tracy and lives with 5 other people in a 3 bedroom house and doesn’t have health insurance because they can’t afford the subsidized rate nor the deductible. Their mask is impenetrable and only drops once they pull into the drive thru in Hayward for some McChickens to tide them over for the last hour of the commute.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#268There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…
Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers.
Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, although I thought there was another big one whose name escapes me. Any ideas? Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.
Looks like Wikipedia actually has the full list. DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages.
I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
From that page:
> As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.
> […]
> While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c...
Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...
Re: Culture Change at Google
#270There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…
[deleted]