51–60 of 485 posts
> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell
Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was j…
> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?
This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company.
The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.
I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that " works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.
Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was j…
> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.
Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was j…
Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.
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"The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself." Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof. What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market". I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win e…
Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unifie…
* What is P&A tech?
* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…
It was and is a factory. Like chrysler and ford before them, and the mines before them.
I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…
After the next few media cycles of AI doomerism and fear mongering we're probably going to see the same thing with AI where any minor risk is intolerable to gov technocrats so they'll make controls where only some megacorp like OpenAI or Google, who has friends and lawyers in the right places, gets to operate with a green light and small players will need to hire a team of lawyers and developers to enforce an ever growing list of controls.
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Ah, if that's your point then I disagree. There is no "DNA". A big tech company can and should try to do many things in many markets, look at Microsoft. When they started with Basic interpreters, or even when they launched Windows, would you have said that Xbox is in their "DNA"?
Perhaps DNA is too strong a word, because it would seem to imply that change is impossible. It's more that Google executed the changes badly, after the "PM shift" as we're calling it happened, they continued to fail to see growth in these new markets, and failed to address exactly why that was. Instead they simply got very good at unlaunching their failed products. All the while, the shift in the company began to dul…