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FAQ on Leaving Google

(social.clawhammer.net)
462 points mrled | 7 comments | 17 Jan 24 22:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.956s | source | bottom
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thrtythreeforty ◴[17 Jan 24 23:40 UTC] No.39035233[source]▶
The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place:

> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.

[1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...

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blibble ◴[18 Jan 24 00:08 UTC] No.39035523[source]▶
> early every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

maps and earth were both acquisitions

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dylan604 ◴[18 Jan 24 00:22 UTC] No.39035666[source]▶
you say acquisitions, others might say stolen.
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1. sjwhevvvvvsj ◴[18 Jan 24 00:31 UTC] No.39035755[source]▶
They bought the companies; that’s very literally not stealing.
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2. dylan604 ◴[18 Jan 24 00:51 UTC] No.39035955[source]▶
So, you're totally discounting the work of Terravision

"The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side.

[0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!

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3. jart ◴[18 Jan 24 01:00 UTC] No.39036057[source]▶
Don't believe everything you watch on television or read on Wikipedia. Terravision was created by the Stanford Research Institute. Google used to be a Stanford research project. The group called ART+COM that Netflix portrays as a bunch of scrappy innovative hackers is actually just a den of patent trolls. I know reality is a bummer isn't it?

> Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51

https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...

4. WalterBright ◴[18 Jan 24 01:35 UTC] No.39036354[source]▶
I've seen plenty of "documentaries" which were really just pushing an agenda. You can distinguish advocacy from accuracy usually within the first few sentences.
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5. dylan604 ◴[18 Jan 24 01:53 UTC] No.39036513{3}[source]▶
Which is also said about anything that tends to go against the views of the other side. It's a bit of entertainment "based" on true events. Nobody claims it is the gospel according to.... They even qualify this in the interview I linked.

The majority of people have no idea on how/when/where the products they use on a daily basis originated. By the time a FAANG type of company releases something, you can pretty much be assured there are casualties along the way.

6. jart ◴[18 Jan 24 03:09 UTC] No.39037171{3}[source]▶
Documentaries are usually painfully open about their agendas, like changing policies in Madagascar to save the lemurs, save the smokers, save the obese, etc. But no documentary until "The Billion Dollar Code" ever made me feel genuinely lied to and outright manipulated, and there's no way I would have known if I hadn't read the primary materials. When I discovered the deception, I edited the Terravision Wikipedia page to mention SRI, so there's clues for the next person who enjoys the series, but someone would have to write truthful secondary sources in order for the article to be improved further. Who can say who benefits from poking Google Maps in the eye. Netflix must have been tripping when they approved that one.
7. WalterBright ◴[18 Jan 24 08:12 UTC] No.39039265{3}[source]▶
The obviousness comes from:

1. speculation, without identifying it as speculation

2. hyperbolic words

3. absence of any contraindications to their thesis