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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#371

Post by alephnerd »

swozey wrote: post #356
alephnerd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advertis…

That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO).

Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife

Re: Culture Change at Google

#372

Post by skywhopper »

flkenosad wrote: post #337
gmadsen wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, I have never heard the term "child raiser" in my life so I assume its even more confusing for those with english as a second language. It also just sounds so emotionless, like children are cattle. I'm really struggling to see what is gained by not using parent. For all intents and purposes, people use the term parent for those raising a child.

Yeah it's just internet people trying to coin terms then gaslighting those who don't adopt.

No one is gaslighting anyone, except maybe the folks who pretend language never changes. No one complained about the use of "parent". The folks who started the argument complained about "child raiser". The problem here are the "internet people" who pick pointless fights about the motives behind anyone who does anything differently than they would have done.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#373

Post by MarketingJason »

nigelk wrote: post #280
apwell23 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll bet many people were willing to pay that if executives and managers had there kids there. Daycare can provide unique kinds of networking and job-security/promotion options.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#374

Post by the_third_wave »

the_third_wave wrote: post #101
SkyMarshal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives do you recommend for email? That's my one google service I have difficulty getting away from.

Self-host, easy. No matter the hordes of detractors who will tell you this is impossible and that all your mail will be /dev/nulled by all the usual suspects (Microsoft, Microsoft and Microsoft being the main culprit here, Gmail comes in second) the truth is that you'll be fine as long as you make sure to configure things like SPF and DKIM correctly and you're either using a smarthost for outgoing mail (ask your IAP…

It would be interesting to hear why the armchair experts clicked that vote-down arrow instead of reacting. The fact that you think self-hosting mail can not be done does not mean others can not do it. If you happen to work for a mail hosting company and feel you need to grey out potential competition that'd be understandable (if fraudulent) but otherwise I do not understand this reaction. Does the fact that others can self-host make you feel insecure? Does the fact that this gives those people freedom and the opportunity to evade censorship threaten you? Let's hear it, I'm interested in understanding the background for this ever so common reaction to any suggestion of not letting the experts handle things like this.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#375

Post by DiggyJohnson »

red_admiral wrote: post #207

There'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…

Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#376

Post by ziddoap »

nostrademons wrote: post #268
red_admiral wrote: post #207

There'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 Goog…

>Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists

I might be parsing this incorrectly, but isn't this sentence saying "too many people used the daycare (long waitlist), so not many people could use it"?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#377

Post by [deleted] »

altaltson wrote: post #354
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 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…

[deleted]

Re: Culture Change at Google

#378

Post by ralfd »

WindyMiller wrote: post #318
0xcafecafe wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't think 'people' is really an edge case.

It is newspeak to avoid saying „pregnant women“.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#379

Post by matsemann »

nostrademons wrote: post #368
swexbe wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees

I wonder what the equivalent "why are manhole covers round" and "reverse this linked list" questions are for a caretaker.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#380

Post by lumost »

red_admiral wrote: post #207

There'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…

I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline.

There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.

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