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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#361

Post by DoughnutHole »

robertlagrant wrote: post #348
Ensorceled wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you are claiming they are "taking defense" not "taking offence"? Is this a terrible dad joke?

It is, but it's also a point - if something is being changed, pushing back shouldn't be assumed to be being offended. In some cases, the people doing the change will be offended if you don't comply. And that will keep going when the change is changed again.

That's a weird distinction you've constructed to make it sound more okay to be offended if you feel you hold the more traditional position.

> take offense (idiom) : to become angry or upset by something that another person has said or done : to be offended by something - Merriam-Webster

That's all it means. If you're upset because someone says something different to what you consider the natural default you're still offended.

People take offence to changes to and transgression against cultural norms all the time - offence at public gay affection, offence at interracial relationships, offence at not respecting christianity and religious norms, offence at use of swears, offence at the normalisation of talking about sex etc etc.

Taking offence to certain changes to language isn't necessarily wrong, but it's still taking offence. "Taking offence" is what happens to you when something transgresses against your belief system, it's not just what the bad people do.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#362

Post by _heimdall »

JohnFen wrote: post #313
_heimdall wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

> I consider anyone raising a child as their parents As do I. Parents are the ones doing parenting. Whether or not they are the biological parents isn't relevant to that.

My only caveat is that if someone shares with me that they don't refer to themselves as a parent I'd respect that. I just would expect that to be a pretty rare outlier all things considered, and benign if I incorrectly refer to them as a parent initially.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#363

Post by fifirndisiwbbd »

snowwrestler wrote: post #350
greatgib wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the employees of the day care be able to be considered as "child raiser" if I follow the meaning of the words?

No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.

There are plenty of “child raisers” who provide more care than a daycare and less than a parent.

And since we’re being technically correct, raising a child is always optional (even for the parent).

Re: Culture Change at Google

#364

Post by apwell23 »

swozey wrote: post #349
apwell23 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google. oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost

Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.

we pay 2k/month here in chicago, so that number kind of makes sense to me.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#365

Post by alephnerd »

altaltson wrote: post #345

I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect. The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe…

This is a very hot take, but does mesh with my own experience with mentors, friends, and family at GOOG at the time.

I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.

There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.

Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#366

Post by sotix »

0xpgm wrote: post #48
zamfi wrote: post #24

Is 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 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 wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#367

Post by fifirndisiwbbd »

PawgerZ wrote: post #340
flkenosad wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it's bad neologism. It's that neologism is bad in general. :-)

New words are bad in general? How so?

Change is hard and expensive. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.

Far too often those introducing new words (or even worse redefining existing ones) are playing power games with their in groups best interests in mind, not the rest of us.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#368

Post by nostrademons »

swexbe wrote: post #355
swozey wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Going rate for a nanny is about $25/hour or about $4000-5000/month in the Bay Area, so yes, it was roughly the same price. I know many, many Googler families with daytime nannies, night nannies, multiple nannies, etc.

The two main things you got with the in-house daycare was a.) consistency and b.) convenience. I have a teammate whose kid went through the Google daycare; she said that at the time (over a decade ago now), it really was quite high quality, and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees. (I've also heard that this - like many other things about Google - has gone downhill in recent years, and that people whose kids went through post-COVID dealt with high staff turnover and inadequate care.) Meanwhile, almost everybody I know who uses nannies for full-time care has had horror stories about finding a reliable nanny. Some are flakes who don't show up to work; some seem to have perpetual car trouble; some are neglectful; some always have their boyfriend come over and spend more time with him than the kids; some get fired for putting the kids in danger. Nannies are not licensed, unlike daycares. It's very much parent-beware, and a lot of people don't have time to search for a good nanny, hire them, and monitor them to make sure their kids will be safe.

There's also just a convenience benefit from having your kid on-site. You can share commutes; you can use the carpool lane; your schedules are identical; you can pick up your kid in a blink if they get sick; you know they're always close; you don't need to coordinate logistics with a nanny; your time schedules will overlay; and so on.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#369

Post by skywhopper »

flkenosad wrote: post #332
froh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

child-riser is a lovely neologism, more self-explanatory than caretaker, but still caretaker is well established. and to clarify: I chuckled with sympathy reading your response :-)

It's not that it's bad neologism. It's that neologism is bad in general. :-)

Every word you just wrote was a neologism at some point.
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