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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#381

Post by medler »

ziddoap wrote: post #376
nostrademons wrote: post #268

Earlier 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…

> 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"?

But the people on the waitlist are not using the daycare. I don’t know the numbers in this case but you could imagine a daycare with 10 slots and 1000 people on the waitlist.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#382

Post by dfxm12 »

ziddoap wrote: post #376
nostrademons wrote: post #268

Earlier 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…

> 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"?

"Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded" - Yogi Berra

The point isn't about popularity (or not) of the daycare. The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#383

Post by thinkerswell »

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.

What an insult to someone who has taken on the responsibility of raising a child. Of course they should be called parents. A man doesn’t adopt a son only to be called his “child raiser”. Stop this foolish line of thought.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#384

Post by red-iron-pine »

edgyquant wrote: post #223
JeffSnazz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.

States are rational actors though

when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time.

dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).

Re: Culture Change at Google

#385

Post by archagon »

matsemann wrote: post #379
nostrademons wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anything, Google should ask prospective engineers how they would corral a room full of boisterous toddlers.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#386

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Culture Change at Google

#387

Post by Tade0 »

teddyh wrote: post #216
edgyquant wrote: post #208

[flagged]

Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.

They are if they're raising that child and I don't think you'll find many people with adoptive/step children cheering on being called like that.

They're parents, as simple as that.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#388

Post by euroderf »

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…

> (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month)

That's not a service, that's a profit center !

Re: Culture Change at Google

#389

Post by nostrademons »

ziddoap wrote: post #376
nostrademons wrote: post #268

Earlier 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…

> 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"?

A better model is "The daycare was supply-constrained and never expanded at the same rate as Google's employee base, so it ended up having little influence on the overall population." That resolves the contradiction while still being an accurate representation of reality.

It's the same phenomena as the housing market or California's population today. Both are super expensive and not growing. The reason they are super expensive is that they are not growing, while the pool of potential buyers is.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#390

Post by robertlagrant »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #361
robertlagrant wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you've constructed to make it sound more okay to be offended if you feel you hold the more traditional position

You're incorrect. I didn't construct it to do that.

> "Taking offence" is what happens to you when something transgresses against your belief system, it's not just what the bad people do.

All the rest of your comment isn't really to do with what I was saying, although it does illustrate it. I was saying it's silly to change something and then call any pushback "offence", rather than a wide range of things it might be (unnecessary; harder to understand; unfamiliar; yet another change of a bazillion and it'll change again soon).

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