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Googler... ex-Googler

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Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#971

Post by rchaud »

jldugger wrote: post #938
rchaud wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the prospective buyer's name rhymes with Melon Tusk, I doubt the DOJ will do anything to challenge Google's web monopoly this strongly.

You don't think DOJ will force Google sell chrome? https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...

No, not unless there is a large American buyer already in place. The DOJ did not force Microsoft to sell IE in 2001 either, and back then there was no US software company anywhere near Microsoft's size that would have purchased it. DOJ are not in the business of eliminating a global monopoly if a US company holds said monopoly.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#972

Post by SR2Z »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #969
SR2Z wrote: post #941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photos was brand new in 2015. Search is from 1998. I'm not a mathematician but that means that search is about three times older than it... If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it, I don't know if there's much of a point to me trying to convince you

> If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said. Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent f…

> Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015.

Google has had several previous photos apps! The actually useful one is the most recent.

> Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age.

So you swear you aren't demanding proof that services released in the past five years are successes, but you're complaining that pretty much anything older is too old.

Dude, I am engaging with what you said. Almost no product is wildly successful in less than 10 years by Google's standards, because Google measures users in billions.

If you still wanna ignore Photos, then talk about Gemini, Cloud, and Waymo. The Pixel phones are also doing pretty well, considering how dominant Apple has been.

My point here is that you're ignoring numbers that would be INSANE for any startup because the product is from Google. It really seems to me like you're looking for reasons to discredit the company instead of the truth, which is that non-ad revenue is 25% of the total and growing.

That's pretty significant and in absolute terms makes Google a giant even without search.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#973

Post by ChuckMcM »

saagarjha wrote: post #959
ChuckMcM wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?" And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was ab…

Recruiting is quite expensive, and employees naturally lose to the market rate by staying at one company for a while. I don't think this really matches what you're suggesting.

Remember that bit about billions of dollars every quarter in free cash flow? That's after spending on things like 'recruiting' and 'building another 50MW data center' kinds of expenses. If you're a startup, recruiting costs are an annoyingly big chunk of your burn, if you're Google, not so much.

Another big thing at Google was data science, or "Using data to win arguments" as a prominent Google engineer once wrote. I would not be surprised that someone has code that assesses the cost of replacing people where they figure out "current pay package of existing engineer" - "recruiting costs" + "new pay package" and the manage the list of people who are now 'replacable' because that number has gone in favor of replacement.

I was pitched a project to work on when I was there called "find and expert" or something which was designed to identify individuals who were 'experts' and relied on by the organization. Reasonable thing right? Know who your experts are. But the folks putting this together were also associated with People Operations trying to replace people. It didn't take too much effort to connect the dots on that. Was it evil? Yes? No? Kind of? It was more like "we want a company where everyone is easily replaceable without risk to the company." That certainly plays well with the shareholders. Felt a bit like the Borg trying to integrate ones technical distinctiveness into the collective.

It has always been a career limiter of mine that I care about the people more than I care about the company.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#974

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

asadalt wrote: post #701
dani__german wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people are getting quite snippy about this comment, but hating this mindset means you lock yourself away from so much actual wealth. It means you confine and condemn people to significantly worse economic conditions by limiting people's ability to freely associate and disassociate. just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes…

exactly, as a startup founder i wouldn’t commit to a yearly reserved ec2 instance for a year let alone an employee.

Wow, that's an interesting perspective.

Meanwhile, Big tech (pre-2022) went to pretty extreme lengths to keep tenured employees around because of all the knowledge they'd built up which made them valuable to the company.

But whatevs, you do you. I'd advise you to only hire contractors if you want people to stay less than a year.

And it's worth noting that you appear to be responding to people who are in German speaking countries, where 3 months notice is standard. Other parts of Europe are not like this, and in Ireland you can fire as per the US for the first 6 months/year, and only need to pay redundancy if they've been there 2+ years.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#975

Post by anacrolix »

mcv wrote: post #813
wiether wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil". https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...

Google dropped their "don't be evil" a very long time ago.

Before I even started there, in 2014. Don't be evil ended when Schmidt stopped being CEO.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#976

Post by methuselah_in »

Man this was sad. The part of the word that you are about to get ready and leave for work next morning. Have to login to check your emails. I am an introvert though usually do work from home guy and in 33+ age group. I had to resign recently and then I tried to get the job back. It was hard to get it. I am sales guy thoigh. Your expense just stop being regular now. But I hope the skills you have are going to get you a job in no time.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#977

Post by saltybytes »

Was laid off more than 2 years ago.

For me it was not the process (the company I worked for announced their plans early) of being let go - it is the current job market that keeps me from sleeping at night: every day I get rejection emails, every day I'm told I'm not good enough or that other 220 candidates applied for the position. I feel obsolete, depressed. All I want is to find a job where I can be helpful, have a purpose and focus on my work goals.

If you have any work please reach out to me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianskala/

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#978

Post by bee_rider »

WorldMaker wrote: post #967
bee_rider wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be nice, if it turned into Red Hat. But IBM was first, right?

IBM owns Red Hat, and companies grow to resemble their acquisitions all the time, though I think more people believe Red Hat is already deep in being borgified to be IBM Linux more than the other way around.

I’m aware… it just seems too good to be true, that IBM could be corrected by Red Hat.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#979

Post by matchanovice »

rurp wrote: post #829
wiether wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil". https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...

I can't wait for everyone to be shocked, shocked , in five years when the biggest genAI companies get caught engaging in a bunch of sleazy behavior.

Sleazy like when Meta torrented 81TB worth of ebooks to train their AI models? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#980

Post by tharkun__ »

bdolgov wrote: post #953
tharkun__ wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they said. They said, if Photos is currently recent (aka 2025-2015 = 10 years = recent) then Search was recent when Photos came out (aka 2015-1998 = 12 years = recent). Which given the overall timeframes, I'd say that's close enough to say 10 years ~= 12 years. And they said they'd actually count the non-Photos time of Photos as Photos, so add some to the 10 years.

2015-1998 = 17, not 12.

ROFL, HN needs Cap'n Picard face palm. You are of course correct. slowly walks out backwards while trying to turn less than lobster red
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