I think a lot of people imagine leaving GMail as being very difficult but in my experience, not really. Get Fastmail and set it up with a custom domain. Not free, but suuuper cheap. Then go through all your accounts and update your email address. Forward GMail to your new email for a while. Done.
You're just glancing over the part where someone has years of archived, labeled, tagged emails in a convenient searchable UI. Importing that isn't straightforward for a techie, let alone a non-techie.
Yes I did, sorry. Fastmail does have a GMail import (and tags become folders). The UI is different, yes.
Tldr politics, glass ceilings, re-orgs, purposeless/abandoned projects. As a former Googler, I can see why people post these: internally Google is hyper-evangelized as the best place to work ever (why would you work anywhere else). When leaving, its a necessary step to form a good argument for yourself as to why you've decided to go against the culture. The personal spin makes it an interesting read.
I always find the "best places to work" type lists a lot of crap. Usually its just a case of biggest and best known companies. I have worked for a real mix of places and the biggest companies haven't been any better than the smaller ones. Usually a good manager makes a far bigger difference.
I worked at a 'best place to work', and... the pay/benefits for many of the 'regular' folks was pretty good - above average for sure. and overall it was nice to work there, but the politics in the IT dept were difficult for me to deal with. I asked for a transfer to another project or another area and was declined so... there wasn't much option except to leave. I had one guy telling me to 'chill out' and relax some - he was dating the niece of the dept manager, so, there wasn't much chance of him having issues there. there was very much a culture of "person X has worked here longer, listen to them" regardless of how much experience they had with respect to the actual domain or technology on the project, which was frustrating. The managers I had were, most of them, nice people - I liked them. But it didn't seem they noticed or cared about the inefficiencies and politics going on. More than a few people said - "if you want to move up here, it's going to take 5-10 years of just 'being around'" and... I didn't care to wait that long (especially not when the gospel preached was about merit and ability being the measuring sticks).
On a somewhat related note, I have found Algolia to be an effective way to search for popular stories that got flagged. Once or twice a day I go to hn.algolia.com and view popular stories for the last 24 hours. This is also an effective way to review popular stories for the last day, whether they got flagged or not. Since Algolia is using a much simpler ranking than the Hacker News front page, you get a much more sta…
Another site that does this well: I always review the top10 for days that I was too busy to check into HN.
Not using google is much simpler then it sounds. - iPhone - DDG - Firefox/Safari - Some other email then google That's pretty much all you need.
I think a lot of people imagine leaving GMail as being very difficult but in my experience, not really. Get Fastmail and set it up with a custom domain. Not free, but suuuper cheap. Then go through all your accounts and update your email address. Forward GMail to your new email for a while. Done.
I did exactly this 2 years ago and it was just as painless as you described. Took a few months of slowly migrating various accounts to new email via forwarding. I’m just annoyed at myself for not having done it sooner.
I'm curious to see what kind of discussion this generates before the HN mods inevitably kick it off the front page. Most of these links seem to be of employees who quit, but I'll add my article as a user who quit: https://drewdevault.com/2016/11/16/Getting-on-without-Google...
Not using google is much simpler then it sounds. - iPhone - DDG - Firefox/Safari - Some other email then google That's pretty much all you need.
I’ve done all of that except for gmail and that account is slowly turning into my ancient Hotmail account.
I don’t miss Google services - apart from Maps—Apple Maps is usable, just.
Yes, one needs a reason for leaving a company. But at the same time, one leaves a company or a religion or a relationship for a reason . The argument and reasoning necessitate the departure; they're not developed post hoc. Of course, additional supporting reasons become clear as one looks for and finds the door, and the understanding for why a person or institution is wrong for you evolves as you separate. I'd be int…
> Yes, one needs a reason for leaving a company. But at the same time, one leaves a company or a religion or a relationship for a reason. The argument and reasoning necessitate the departure; they're not developed post hoc. It actually seems like this is frequently the case to me. A lot of people get to the point where they simply don't like coming into work everyday, and have to come up for a reason why they feel th…
> A lot of people get to the point where they simply don't like coming into work everyday, and have to come up for a reason why they feel that way.
Since they "don't like coming into work", the reason already exists, they just (maybe) don't know it yet. As such, it isn't so much inventing a reason as it is discovering it.
On a somewhat related note, I have found Algolia to be an effective way to search for popular stories that got flagged. Once or twice a day I go to hn.algolia.com and view popular stories for the last 24 hours. This is also an effective way to review popular stories for the last day, whether they got flagged or not. Since Algolia is using a much simpler ranking than the Hacker News front page, you get a much more sta…
I incidentally made the same search yesterday because I had the same question regarding the tone , in light of how the most recent viral post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220666 ) utterly slams Google. Unless there's corporate malfeasance, it's counterproductive in the long run to talk so badly about a former employer, especially on a forever-archived blog post. Even if it does feel good to let out pent-u…
Steve sees systems so when he describes problems he describes them using language that describes systems. And as his take on the challenge Google faces is largely similar to that of many others (including myself), I don't think it will hurt him to have this out there "forever."
Not using google is much simpler then it sounds. - iPhone - DDG - Firefox/Safari - Some other email then google That's pretty much all you need.
A coworker uses DDG and each time we are talking about a problem at work (software development) and need to search something, I am disappointed by the lack of good results and make him use Google instead. It is currently 5 - 0 for Google if I recall correctly. I would switch in a heartbeat if the results were comparable. Every time I’ve given it (or Bing) a shot for a few weeks, Google was simply better.
After using ddg for a while it feels much easier to find what I need using it than google. Maybe because I am not sandboxed correctly by google. Then again, ddg gives good results without sandboxing.
I'm curious to see what kind of discussion this generates before the HN mods inevitably kick it off the front page. Most of these links seem to be of employees who quit, but I'll add my article as a user who quit: https://drewdevault.com/2016/11/16/Getting-on-without-Google...
Oh my god your youtube flow is GENIUS. I am extremely excited about trying it. How did you choose mpv?