381–390 of 417 posts
A phd quit my employer and went to google. On last week we were discussing relative differences. He pointed out searching for X really had no wrong results and even if you didn't like it who you gonna call? Google probably is a little siloed from customers in a way many other business are not. Our IT systems deal in money. There's nowhere to run and hide from customers.
Microsoft still wins on the desktop. The only way to beat them was to compete in new emerging markets.
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The promotion system isn't the issue, the promotion system was the issue 10 years ago. For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things. If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling t…
It might be even deeper than that. I don't know if it's representative, the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative. Keeping backward-compatibility requires people that care. That have enough pride in their work to counter-balance the grind.
The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group . If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, l…
(warning rambling rant) I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus. I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore. Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now. But for their ad revenue what would they be? Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff. It's cool but t…
I think Google couldn't do better, even if they wanted to. The reason is the engineering culture and the promotion system. People expect to switch to new projects, and work towards to a promotion within 2-3 years. This shows in all products, and presumalby also the reason for the deprecation. New people come on the project, want and need to do a major overhaul, and do not have resource or incentives to support the ol…
> Let’s say hypothetically that Apple was dumb enough to pull a Guido van Rossum, and declare that Swift 6.0 is backwards-incompatible with Swift 5.0, much in the way that Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2. Damn, I was waiting for this. The whole essay was a setup for this paragraph. Reframes the argument using a shared traumatic experience for everyone. This humanizes the effect, we all know someone that lost s…
I don't get the Python3 bw-incompatibility hate. Getting rid of cruft is literally the only way to get rid of cruft. It's literally the Pythonic to not have cruft. I dread the day Python will be as bloated as C++ or Java, neither that dare to remove things.
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The sad part about the js ecosystem is that even the biggest corps like Google can't keep their own js ecosystem stable on the last version. I have a small Angular app with Firebase backend and every time I come back to it to update, the libs are out of sync
Google is notoriously bad at maintaining (or even designing) their open-source stuff. I wouldn't say "even the biggest corps like Google" -- Google does considerably worse at this than many hobbyist maintainers! I just don't use Google libraries anymore, if I can at all avoid it. See also my other comment[1] - Angular is an example of such a magical does-everything framework. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…
> Let’s say hypothetically that Apple was dumb enough to pull a Guido van Rossum, and declare that Swift 6.0 is backwards-incompatible with Swift 5.0, much in the way that Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2. Damn, I was waiting for this. The whole essay was a setup for this paragraph. Reframes the argument using a shared traumatic experience for everyone. This humanizes the effect, we all know someone that lost s…
I don't get the Python3 bw-incompatibility hate. Getting rid of cruft is literally the only way to get rid of cruft. It's literally the Pythonic to not have cruft. I dread the day Python will be as bloated as C++ or Java, neither that dare to remove things.
That the transition took nearly a decade (and for some still goes at this point) and several minor-versions is another hint at strong problems in planing. At the end we got something better, but the road toward it was just far to painful for what we got. And this fuels hate till today.
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> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews. > I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusi…
And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? The usual recipe for success in tech: competitors who are even less competent. See also: how Microsoft dominated personal computing back in the day.
By making illegal deals with PC sellers, and by vandalizing apps running on their OS.
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I've always passed interviews that focused on behavioral aspects, I've frequently struggled in algorithm focused loops (bombed 2/4 in my Google onsite because, again, I'm intellectually inferior). Besides, until recently G didn't include any behavioral loops. > "compared to a very small subset of people I have failed" Compared to nearly everyone at elite universities I have absolutely failed. I'm sure some of them wi…
Even here you have many false assumptions though. For instance, the Harvard median new grad salary is 69k [1]. So you’re wrong in your assertion that compared to nearly everyone at elite universities you have failed. By your own definition of success, compared to most (by definition of median) people at elite universities, you have succeeded, and it’s they who have failed. You also have an implicit assumption that pe…