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FAQ on Leaving Google

(social.clawhammer.net)
462 points mrled | 21 comments | 17 Jan 24 22:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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sjwhevvvvvsj ◴[18 Jan 24 00:29 UTC] No.39035738[source]▶
Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are.

The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.

Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.

Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc

20% was always a myth.

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1. dilyevsky ◴[18 Jan 24 02:20 UTC] No.39036708[source]▶
Android was developed entirely at google (and redone midway after iphone came out) despite being originally an acquisition. Youtube basically just sold userbase + content. Chrome. Waymo. AppEngine precedes ec2 and heroku by some time. Most of hashicorp products (and dozen other startups) are basically copies of what google had internally.

The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water

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2. commandersaki ◴[18 Jan 24 02:26 UTC] No.39036765[source]▶
Wasn't the idea of Android basically the acquisition of Danger Inc.
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3. dilyevsky ◴[18 Jan 24 02:33 UTC] No.39036832[source]▶
Kind of - danger was bought by msft, then everyone left and joined Android/Google. I think their original plan more akin to those chinese all-in-one apps
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4. eigen ◴[18 Jan 24 02:43 UTC] No.39036919[source]▶
I believe it was Android Inc. that Google purchased. Danger was a previous company founded by Andy Rubin and others.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110205190729/http://www.busine...

5. shermantanktop ◴[18 Jan 24 03:29 UTC] No.39037365[source]▶
This kind of lineage is interesting, but I don’t give large amounts of credit-for-success to a company that failed at what they were trying to do, or gave up and sold themselves off. How much of why Android is huge today could really be attributed to Danger? Not too much, in my book.

Can we really say that Danger could have accomplished the same thing? I was in the carrier industry at that time and Danger was just another handset company.

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6. gretch ◴[18 Jan 24 04:14 UTC] No.39037748[source]▶
YouTube was founded in 2005, and then sold to Google in 2006.

Then it was run under Google from 2006 to 2023.

Does anyone remember what 2005 looked like at all?

But people really like the narrative that Google couldn’t make a YouTube

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7. klooney ◴[18 Jan 24 04:23 UTC] No.39037823{3}[source]▶
Android's whole design is very Danger though- the Java userspace, Binder RPC stuff.
8. throwaway2037 ◴[18 Jan 24 04:37 UTC] No.39037907[source]▶
And, there is no way that YouTube could survive on its own. The last mile bandwidth problem required a Google-sized company to help them solve it. This is usually overlooked.
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9. thanksgiving ◴[18 Jan 24 04:38 UTC] No.39037917{3}[source]▶
I thought the original idea was instead of having to download and run random JAR files for random Nokia or Erickson phones, wouldn’t it be nice to have an open handset alliance that would allow developers like Google to write their applications only once and it would work on all phones running android…
10. xnx ◴[18 Jan 24 04:54 UTC] No.39038022[source]▶
I remember Google Videos being better than YouTube at the time, but IIRC it didn't have the amount of pirate content that initially made YouTube popular.
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11. dilyevsky ◴[18 Jan 24 05:14 UTC] No.39038170{3}[source]▶
Legend has it they had like weeks of runway left and didn’t pay any of their bills once it looked like the deal was going to close
12. choppaface ◴[18 Jan 24 05:37 UTC] No.39038312[source]▶
Not so much that Google hasn't birthed _any_ original products but rather that their customer service is abysmal and they've consistently shown poor long-term commitment to the end user, or worse, e.g. Reader, Nest, Fitbit, even Tensorflow is dead. The theory is that Google makes it needlessly hard for product people to innovate there, and the evidence is in Google's outsized insularity and coddling of technical projects that end up mostly for internal entertainment.
13. yjftsjthsd-h ◴[18 Jan 24 06:09 UTC] No.39038516[source]▶
> Youtube basically just sold userbase + content.

Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.

> Chrome.

Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

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14. Scoring6931 ◴[18 Jan 24 06:46 UTC] No.39038749[source]▶
They had a YouTube. It was called Google Video, and it went nowhere.
15. zilti ◴[18 Jan 24 07:03 UTC] No.39038861[source]▶
They did have Google Videos before they bought Youtube, and integrated it a while after.
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16. dilyevsky ◴[18 Jan 24 07:17 UTC] No.39038933[source]▶
> Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.

The YouTube product which is their creator economy that exists today didn't back then. In fact, I'm pretty sure original team would've run out of money soon.

> Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

And Docker is "a wrapper" around Linux Cgroups. So? It was a unique product with instant market fit - "fast browser without the UI clutter and with sandbox'ed tabs".

17. billjings ◴[18 Jan 24 07:25 UTC] No.39038981[source]▶
This is a really off base characterization of Android within Google.

Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another.

There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.

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18. ponderings ◴[18 Jan 24 08:02 UTC] No.39039200{3}[source]▶
Right, it was google video (that was just a bunch of users and content) that was "merged" into youtube. As usual they didn't bother redirecting the url's. Just let all of those hundreds of millions of links rot. What an opportunity to ruin an unimaginable number of threads and blog posts.

I'm trying to picture a white board with someone drawing up a plan how to destroy everything and take over.

Woah, video replies, we have to remove those. Threaded conversations under videos? Lets make them into an unbearable mess and make it as hard as possible for anyone to have a conversation. We can put it under history! ha-ha good one! Wait, we could suck everyone into a vacuum and have them all watch the same videos? ~ Excellent idea!

Creative company indeed

19. versteegen ◴[18 Jan 24 09:34 UTC] No.39039785[source]▶
Yeah, when I first looked at the shocking source code for bionic (Android's libc) to figure out why my code wasn't working I couldn't believe it was written by Google. It wasn't really. (Nor did they (initially) borrow from any of the high-quality open source libcs out there.)
20. dilyevsky ◴[18 Jan 24 20:01 UTC] No.39046819[source]▶
A lot of teams at google had culture differences. And imho it was always more about andy's ego more than anything.
21. sjwhevvvvvsj ◴[18 Jan 24 20:20 UTC] No.39047090{3}[source]▶
This was borne out in lawsuits. The YouTube tech wasn’t better, GVideo was superior but disnt have the same buzz or content, it was the pirated content Google wanted. The emails are public record.