Evil is not something that applies to a person only. A company can be evil too. Look at facebook
Culture Change at Google
271–280 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#272There'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.
is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#273Earlier 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.
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Re: Culture Change at Google
#274Is 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…
Man I wish I could be infected with this disease
Re: Culture Change at Google
#275People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit. When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet…
You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions.
Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#276Earlier 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.
IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
Re: Culture Change at Google
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies 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.
Funnily enough my experience of politics was far worse in a larger, more established company than a smaller one.
Maybe a different kind of politics, but it was toxic as fuck and my career was basically at the mercy of heads and directors that I would never have reason to interact with. Hit a bump on a project that causes a delay? Expect some higher up to threaten the prospects of the entire team unless we got it done on time.
Most of the people engaging and benefitting from such cut-throat politics and gossip had no right to be in such management positions. Non-existent leadership skills.
Tiny startups can be equally rough but at least it's more direct.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#278Earlier 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.
“Child raiser” is perfectly adequate to the context of a conversation about people who are raising children.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
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Re: Culture Change at Google
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.
It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.