

Of Google's First 20 Employees, How Many Are Still There? - ca98am79
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/07/18/of-googles-first-20-employees-besides-larry-and-sergey-how-many-are-still-there/

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nostrademons
Many of these are very recent departures, eg. Craig Silverstein left in Feb
2012, Amit Patel was within the last year or two, Marissa was last week. I'm
kinda amazed that half of the first 20 employees had 10+ year careers there,
despite being financially independent since the IPO. I read somewhere that
median Silicon Valley job tenure is about 2-3 years.

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ChuckMcM
The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming
"old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily
irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the
symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time
at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they
were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt
was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were.
At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He
pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round.
From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing
out the same way.

The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of
JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of
them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they
chose to. But an interesting thing happens.

When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever
you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another.
And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.

This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes
expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'

The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value
rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop
everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new
employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule
fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things
are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get
fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become
immensely more effective.

And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't
like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I
know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else
and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate
about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some
time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but
once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in
their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all
surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue
to work there for many more years. _How_ they work changes, and sometimes what
they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.

As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have
short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then
at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there
for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to
10 years but its really an individual thing.

~~~
magicalist
I always find this kind of speculation through determinism a little silly
(under the covers all it's really saying is "x is the new y").

Yes, many companies fall into similar patterns as they get older, but many
don't. Most of the giant corporations we talk about on HN are fairly unique,
don't have exact analogues, and, complex systems being what they are...
Meanwhile, people also leave jobs because they took them when they were 25 and
now they want to try their hand at Khan Academy (or Yahoo for some reason).

Basically I'm suspicious of any pat narrative :)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think you are absolutely right to suspicious of such narratives. They are
always a product of both the observer's bias and the systemic bias of the
environment in which they operate. I didn't immigrate here, which changes how
I experience the place, and as someone who tends to work for 5 to 10 years at
a place the half dozen places I have direct experience at are a small fraction
of the total number of companies.

The effect I've observed is that Silicon Valley has such mobility (which is to
say between jobs) and such commonality between business structure, that the
larger companies get, the less pronounced their differences become. I
attribute that to the challenge of assimilating folks into the company culture
that is too far off the valley 'mainstream.' It also provides a tremendous
amount of cross fertilization where people say "Oh at my old company we used
to do X" and if its a better thing than what the locals do it has a good
chance of being adopted. So management techniques, office layouts, and
programming methodologies have a sort of viral nature to them as well. This
seems to homogenize the way companies evolve than you might expect.

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notJim
Although I hate Quora, I really would prefer a Quora link to a Forbes link,
considering that Quora created the content in the first place:
[http://www.quora.com/Google/Of-Googles-first-20-employees-
be...](http://www.quora.com/Google/Of-Googles-first-20-employees-besides-
Larry-Sergey-how-many-are-still-there).

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ssx
Compare this to Facebook: 3/20

Entirely different loyalty, maybe even belief in the long term. I would say
that the difference between the two companies is that Facebook hired young,
while Google hired older, highly educated employees.

(In the list below, I wouldn't even count Steve Chen, he was from Paypal and
spent no time at Facebook).

[http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-
first-20-employees-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-
first-20-employees-where-are-they-now-2012-2?op=1)

I think the

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pocsav
It has attribution and everything but is just copy pasting an answer from
another website journalism now?

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ericdykstra
For non-anonymous answers, they ask the writer before publishing. I was just
published on there, and got a Quora message asking for my permission. Not sure
how they handle anonymous answers.

~~~
nickbarnwell
Presumably Quora knows who the Anonymous Users are and can facilitate
contacting them

