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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#431

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #425
sojournerc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of it is coming from the carbon in fossilized remains of a time when there was much more O2 in the atmosphere because there was so much flora and a warmer planet... what am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen

Ok, now tell me where the O2 in CO2 comes from. And where it goes after a plant captures the carbon. Now read the original comment again. Did you notice the problem? That wiki page is surprisingly unhelpful. The O2 on the atmosphere mostly doesn't come or go anywhere, but on geological timescales it is mostly created from water and absorbed by rocks. The phenomenon that entire page is about stopped billions of years…

[deleted]

Re: Mourning Google

#432

Post by jra_samba »

fidotron wrote: post #42

There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More contro…

My take on this:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...

Wither Google ?

FYI. This is my recollection of events, but it's been twenty or so years now, so if my memory is fuzzy on the details, please forgive the ramblings of an old engineer :-).

Many years ago, I was working at SGI when the company started to do poorly under the leadership of Rick Belluzzo. In those days the company sponsored the Friday afternoon "beer-bust", when all the employees hung out on what is now the Google volleyball court, drank beer and socialized. Rick cancelled the beer busts as a cost cutting measure.

One of SGI's lead engineers, Casey Leedom (known internally as Mr. IRIX, for SGI's version of UNIX - a codebase he knew inside-out) took it upon himself to self-organize replacement beer-busts with the rest of the engineering staff. We all chipped in to buy the beer, and the Friday afternoon festivities continued as normal.

Rick Belluzzo heard about this, and embarrassed, called Casey into a meeting. "Things aren't that bad", he told Casey. "We can fund the beer-busts again". "No", said Casey. "We know the company is having some hard times, and we're all in this together, so the engineering staff are happy to continue to self-fund the beer-busts".

"There is one thing you could do", Casey added. "I know you are a busy man, but if you could take it upon yourself to occasionally attend a beer-bust, it would be much appreciated by the employees".

"Great idea !", said Rick, and promised to do so. Six or so months later, Rick Belluzzo ran away from SGI over a weekend, and on Monday it was announced that Microsoft had a new VP. "We appear to have lost our CEO" was the email announcement from now acting CEO Bob Bishop.

In the time since Casey asked him to the time he joined Microsoft, Rick attended zero self-sponsored beer busts at SGI.

For some reason I can't see Sundar attending any self-sponsored Google beer-busts either.

Re: Mourning Google

#433

Post by kbenson »

neuromanser wrote: post #400
kbenson wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Jobs as an example here is confusing, because he's noted as being an asshole and also an asshole , so people will read it your way and people will read it the other way.

I could use a clarification here.

>>> Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect.

Compare that to just being an asshole in a petty way that doesn't have a positive outcome, and just causes fear or stress in those you interact with.

Re: Mourning Google

#434

Post by sanderjd »

coldtea wrote: post #98
sanderjd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!

It makes me cringe to think people believe any mention of the past and comparison to the present is automatically some age-induced hallucination, as if reality doesn't exist, changes never happen, and (in this case) 2024 Google isn't a much shittier version of the older Google.

Both things are true: Things change and our perception of things changes.

I'm not the OP so I can't say for sure, but I consider it a near certainty from my own (similar) experience that he's both viewing his time at google through the rose colored glasses of youth and novelty and is correct about the negative changes to the company's culture.

Re: Mourning Google

#435

Post by rezonant »

tuukkah wrote: post #127
ulfw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid" Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?

A middle way exists between "keys to the kingdom" and "no input".

Yep, this is my intention. Good product is made via collaboration between the people writing the stories and determining the overall experience and the engineers that make it happen.

Re: Mourning Google

#436

Post by dralley »

Apocryphon wrote: post #262
fidotron wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this. Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, per…

Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.

Firefox wasn't "bloated", it had a whole ecosystem of browser extensions that HN types loved which by the nature of the extension model ran synchronously with the UI and often stepped on each other's toes, broke on updates, and led to terrible memory leaks.

They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.

Re: Mourning Google

#437

Post by Apocryphon »

dralley wrote: post #436
Apocryphon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.

Firefox wasn't "bloated", it had a whole ecosystem of browser extensions that HN types loved which by the nature of the extension model ran synchronously with the UI and often stepped on each other's toes, broke on updates, and led to terrible memory leaks. They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.

Wasn’t FF getting long in the tooth by 2008, slow and dated? I didn’t have any extensions besides uBlock and Firebug and it didn’t feel as fast as it used to be. Wasn’t that the whole point of project Electrolysis?

Re: Mourning Google

#438

Post by disqard »

aquova wrote: post #280
actualwitch wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is also another issue on top of that - once you establish yourself as a big money maker (a part of FAANG), a lot of tech people start treating a position there as a way to pad resume or make a ton of money. I am convinced it will shift the culture inside the company towards more corporate mindset.

I think this is really the issue. When I was in graduate school, I was in a group for some project. Before class had started, I was showing off another group member some little personal thing I had worked on over the weekend, some game or demo or something. The third group member, having seen this, was shocked that I was spending my spare time programming things for fun. I recall being perplexed by this, as it was pr…

You bring up a good point, and it elicits the question:

Once a company is overwhelmingly infested with folks who are cashing-in-till-they-bounce, should you stick around anyway, even though that'll hurt your career?

Re: Mourning Google

#439

Post by tuukkah »

rezonant wrote: post #435
tuukkah wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A middle way exists between "keys to the kingdom" and "no input".

Yep, this is my intention. Good product is made via collaboration between the people writing the stories and determining the overall experience and the engineers that make it happen.

I would add that in the development of the best products, the engineers don't merely implement, they also invent new features and whole categories of services.

Re: Mourning Google

#440

Post by cmrdporcupine »

opportune wrote: post #401
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer. The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains. And they ke thing is…

I’m biased, as I am guessing you are too, but there is at least some innovation in infrastructure at Google outside of search and ads. Spanner, Borg/Kubernetes/GKE, PAAS, BigQuery and the successive internal query systems just to name a few. Sure many of these were funded by ads or motivated by their problems/use case originally - you’d expect that of a company that started with search and exclusively made money from…

Yeah I tend to think of all the core things you listed as outcroppings of search and ads :-) They're infra needed for that.

(I worked the first couple years in display ads, then some time on Jetstream/Google WiFi then some very brief time in Fiber, then many years in DSPA/Nest, and then for my last year in some Core stuff. So I only got to really use Borg & friends for the first two years and last year of my time there. Left two years ago.)

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