Hacker New's 9/11
Don't mean to be a snob, but you mean "hackernews' 9/11" :)
Still blows my mind that news is just plural for new. I hate it so much, perhaps irrationally.
Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
341–350 of 354 posts
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#342I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
Yep, that was also the point when I started distrusting Google. I was a big Google Reader user and have some dozen geeky friends and we used to share our favourite posts (using the friends following feature).
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do th…
Thanks for sharing the inside story. It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why ? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus? Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out s…
I think there's a complicated answer to that, with a ton of potential reasons and side effects. I can boil my reasons down to 3:
1.) I was L5, and while there were a ton of great L6s, there were not an insignificant number of ones who were terrible. I think L6 would have been the right level for me; L7 was beyond me at the time. People at higher levels don't really seem to work any harder. That translates to the feeling that I'm getting less pay than I deserve. This is why I ultimately left, and I immediately found a job at L6 equivalency.
2.) My manager pushed me towards promotion. My manager was L6, going for L7, and he had way too many direct reports (more than 20). His plan was to move up and have me fill in the vacuum behind him. Without someone to take on that role he was getting denied his promotion.
3.) I wasn't a Google lifer. I wanted to work for a smaller company where I have more of an impact on the bottom line, and I cared about what I was working on, maybe a startup. Unfortunately I have the three deadly "M"s for startup founders (Marriage, Mortgage, and Munchkins). My plan is to wait until the kids are out (1 "M" down). I could get the house paid off by that point with the extra equity that comes in a promotion (2 "M"s down). And I supported my spouse when she started her own business; she wants to support me in mine (that's all 3 "M"s). TL;DR - A promotion would have allowed me to close out all of my debts, freeing me up to not work at Google.
But I think on top of all of that, you have to get people to want to work on your project. Some projects are fun or have social clout, but come with no chance of promotion (I worked on Memegen for 4 years because it was fun). Some projects suck, but they come with promo opportunities. Projects that suck and don't come with a promise of promo don't get engineers applying to transfer in (this is what killed Reader).
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing the inside story. It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why ? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus? Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out s…
I think there's a complicated answer to that, with a ton of potential reasons and side effects. I can boil my reasons down to 3: 1.) I was L5, and while there were a ton of great L6s, there were not an insignificant number of ones who were terrible. I think L6 would have been the right level for me; L7 was beyond me at the time. People at higher levels don't really seem to work any harder. That translates to the feel…
Hey, just wanted to say I appreciate you sharing this insight. I still miss Reader even though it's been 10 years (10 years, holy crap), but this at least explains the 'why'.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is coming from "Google Payments" How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory. Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.
> How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. by that logic, you shouldn't trust any email unless it's signed and you've verified the sender. If the sender is your cloud provider, you read the email and decide from there whether or not it's worthwhile.
Sure, unless the cloud provider uses a subject line indistinguishable from what scammers use.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do th…
[deleted]
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do th…
Thanks for sharing the inside story. It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why ? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus? Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out s…
It’s the same story with ALL successful companies (so far):
(1) Contribution-driven people build successful company.
(2) Successful company attracts money.
(3) Money attracts social-status-driven people.
(4) Social-status-driven people take over company.
(5) Company ceases to be successful.
Moral of the story: Filter out the social-status-driven people who destroy ALL tribes.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…
I wonder how feedly is doing, their higher tier plans focusing on enterprise/analysis/teams suggest the demand for rss still among power users / consumers.
Hi, this is Petr from Feedly, we're doing really well and yes, our focus shifted towards Enterprise - Threat Intelligence and Market Intelligence use cases. Individual users can use our Pro+ plan to access Feedly AI to leverage the power of searching through RSS feeds to get the signals more easily and quickly.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the killer feature was the way emails were (automatically) contextually organized. Instead of your inbox being chronological, it would create "bundles" of emails that were related based on sender, or subject line, or content. You'd have a bundle for each of: your JIRA emails, github emails, bank emails, cron messages, threads with your boss or coworkers, travel emails, receipts, etc. Bundles were created autom…
All these And location based unpinning. I was traveling between two cities for work and there were certain stuff that I wanted to focus on one city, other stuff in the other (also private stuff at hometown). Oh my I miss that feature.
Thanks for the insights to both of you!
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#350Google Reader was an RSS reader. There are many other RSS readers. I don't get the big fuss about it. I never used it.