Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Men can not be pregnant, that’s what makes them men
Are you claiming manhood is defined by what it isn't?
Culture Change at Google
351–360 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?
I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees. It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees. Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect.
They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#353Re: Culture Change at Google
#354Is 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…
I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Goog…
You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work? I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left. Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits. A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and…
That’s crazy. Couldn’t you basically hire a day-time nanny for that price?
Re: Culture Change at Google
#356There'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…
Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.
I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million.
> Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.
And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..
Re: Culture Change at Google
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies. It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out
Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."
Re: Culture Change at Google
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.
How is calling out violations of the GPL license helping copyright trolling? If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.
Citation very much needed, in particular if you're claiming that OpenAI would need to GPL license the OpenAI code ("their stuff") in order to provide the answer (as opposed to the lesser question of whether the code in the text of that answer ought to be covered by GPL).
Re: Culture Change at Google
#359Earlier 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…
I think YouTube is bigger (by profit, revenue, customers, or total hours used) than Netflix, Spotify, and Tik Tok.
See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation
Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...
Re: Culture Change at Google
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the whole point, lots of people ARE parents but aren't child raisers. Even traditional fathers who are part of the family but do not raise their kids because they expect their wife to ARE parents but are not primary raisers of their kids.
Caretaker or guardian is the word you are looking for.
yeah caretaker is a good word but guardian is sth else