FAQ on Leaving Google

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...

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.

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

> 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.

They did have Google Videos before they bought Youtube, and integrated it a while after.