←back to thread

FAQ on Leaving Google

(social.clawhammer.net)
462 points mrled | 2 comments | 17 Jan 24 22:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.497s | source
Show context
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...

replies(6): >>39035428 #>>39035523 #>>39035569 #>>39035617 #>>39035738 #>>39046460 #
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.

replies(6): >>39035852 #>>39036708 #>>39036792 #>>39037838 #>>39038129 #>>39045661 #
United857 ◴[18 Jan 24 00:40 UTC] No.39035852[source]▶
Google Chrome seems like a success as well.
replies(2): >>39035950 #>>39037822 #
linkgoron ◴[18 Jan 24 00:50 UTC] No.39035950[source]▶
Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)
replies(4): >>39036019 #>>39036418 #>>39036726 #>>39037459 #
zbowling ◴[18 Jan 24 00:57 UTC] No.39036019[source]▶
1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
replies(1): >>39036196 #
linkgoron ◴[18 Jan 24 01:16 UTC] No.39036196[source]▶
Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.

replies(2): >>39036598 #>>39038836 #
1. taylortbb ◴[18 Jan 24 06:59 UTC] No.39038836[source]▶
> Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.

replies(1): >>39039749 #
2. linkgoron ◴[18 Jan 24 09:27 UTC] No.39039749[source]▶
I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit.

I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.

Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.