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...

Are there any places today that are like Google in the early days? I would love to work at a place like this.

I also want to know the answer to this, but I'm starting to think I might not recognize it.

Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.

Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...

...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?

Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.

Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.

And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.

Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.

> Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects.

Join the ant revolution!