
Google Execs Seem Out of Touch With Social Networking Culture  - kqr2
http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20101119/the-landscape-around-googles-hiring-binge/
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radioactive21
A bit perplex by these two statemnets.

"But it’s an awkward time at Google, where a group of employees can leave,
create a start-up and come back two years later through an acquisition with
$50 million in their pockets."

So employees leave, create their own startup and Google happens to buy those
startups. Here it sounds like a bad thing.

Yet.... a few sentences down she says , "Google needs to find a way to foster
its employees’ entrepreneurial desires and talents"

Wouldn't this mean more employees would leave? If I have entrepreneurial
desires, I'd quit my job and tried to pursue my own startup.

On a different note, I feel that Facebook is a trend supported by hype that
can be brought down by any other hip social network site down the line. Just
like Xanga, and MySpace before it. A good example is Digg, once thought to be
a behemoth it died almost over night.

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sandipc
Also, how many employees leave Google, create their own startups, and fail?
(or at least... don't get bought out by Google?)

(one example that comes to mind: Cuil)

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Pahalial
This article is plain pageview fodder. It begins by repeating known facts
about the talent war between Facebook and Google, and then dives off about a
"lack of social" at high levels without even attempting any connecting
statements. Yes, Facebook's focus is "social", but it'll take more than an
utterly unsubstantiated almost-quote like "younger employees, especially, say
they are turned off by their bosses’ lack of social media savviness on a
personal level" to convince anyone of even a base correlation.

I really don't think anyone presently working at Google is judging their
bosses by their volume of tweets - and if they are, hiring them may well (imo)
have been an error.

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wyclif
Correlation does not equal causation. The article assumes that because Sergey
and Larry aren't Twittering and Facebooking, "Google does not understand
social." I can't begin to tell you how myopic that view is. Sergey Brin, for
one, is _very_ much behind Buzz, and in many ways Google has not played its
hand yet.

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dcreemer
What a bunch of crap... By that same measure, Apple should considered as doing
horribly as well -- where are the tweets / blog posts / check-ins from Steve
Jobs or other senior execs?

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fjh
I'm probably missing something here, but apple aren't exactly relevant in the
social networking scene, are they?

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dcreemer
Well they do have "Ping" but that probably just proves your point. I brought
this up because the article seemed to me to be about hiring and retention, and
the author cited (poor) social networking as contributing factor for Google
problem in this area.

from the article: "Part of why Google needs to “get social” so badly isn’t
just on a product or market level, but to impress its own employees"

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mkramlich
Companies often become a reflection of the personality of their leadership.
Though this factor should be strongest when the company is the
smallest/youngest. Their strengths, their weaknesses, their tastes. Google
would be just as prone to this, for good or bad, as Apple or Microsoft or
Oracle. In fact, I think you could write the same kind of article about those
other companies, except picking a different area or two where they seem to
have a "blind spot", even if it isn't really accidental, but a matter of
strategy or taste.

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trotsky
I don't hear the rank and file engineers going to facebook talking about how
excited they are to be at a company that "gets it" socially or has really
exciting challenges or their execs talk to people in 140 character blocks
without a filter. I think mostly people going to facebook are looking at their
pre-ipo status next to their roughly guaranteed blockbuster ipo valuation.
Google shares have little chance to appreciate that much anymore, and
certainly not in the timeframe.

