
Life at Google - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/20/Google-Vignettes
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ErrantX
I was looking forward to, well, you know - some content.

It's basically a short "list" of things that are cool at Google each followed
by a comment along the lines of "but I can't really go into detail".

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barrkel
To be frank, Tim is pretty good at doing this - writing posts with very little
content but vaguely cheering on the corporation. I unsubscribed from his RSS
feed over a year ago, and at no time when I come across his blog since do I
feel like I missed anything, or feel compelled to resubscribe.

~~~
mcav
In his defense, his posts are known for brevity. That's why he calls them
"fragments". Some are just a couple sentences long. That doesn't negate that
there may be very little content in the post, but it's consistent with what he
has stated he would do all along.

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throwawayacc
I am working at a second largest IT company in India, in terms of revenue and
I get zero-internet access from 9am to 5pm. During the rest of the hours, I
get the so called 'restricted' internet access, where I cannot check web-
mails, nor can I download any executables, and I don't have admin access to
install anything. Even to install the network printer I need to raise a
request to the computer division. I feel sad.

~~~
d_c
While the situation is sad, would you say this increases or lowers
productivity? (your own / of your company)

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raganwald
"We’re at a weird time in the history of the growth of the Internet. At this
(perhaps anomalous) point, the business leverage resulting from the focused
application of human intelligence is so high that all these benefits and all
this freedom, considered through a pure cold profit-and-loss lens, are cheap
at the price..."

In other words, Google has created an army of superbly intelligent people who
are deeply committed to their mission of covering the surfaces of every
neocortex in the world's brains with little text advertisements.

If this were a classical legend it would be a tragedy of Olympian proportions.

~~~
jacoblyles
I don't know, man. I hear people ragging on advertisement all the time. But
the history of western media is the history of text advertisements. Subsidy
from advertisement made the newspaper something the everyman could buy with
the change in his pocket. In modern times, advertisement still supports most
of the media that people choose to consume.

I know ya'll have read your "no logo" and everything, but you got to
acknowledge that advertisement has done some good. It's hard for me to imagine
what the last two hundred years of history would have been like without it.

How big would the internet be if people couldn't use google ads to pay for
their bandwidth costs? How many small net businesses would never be able to
reach their customers? I know Patrick uses ads to get customers for his bingo
card creator. Thousands of other businesses do.

I just can't hop on the "ads are evil eye pollution" bandwagon.

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raganwald
I'm not hopping on the text ads are evil bandwagon, I'm hopping on the
"Optimizing text advertisements is a rather surprising way to employ the
talent of a generation of smart people" bandwagon.

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philk
That had way less content that I imagined.

I still hope it does turn into a series and he can give us some more
information.

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hvs
There is nothing here that you couldn't figure out even if you aren't an
employee of Google. An example of the insightfulness: _Look at Google’s age in
years and current size and do some arithmetic; insane growth is an everyday
constant._ Groundbreaking.

~~~
brown9-2
Is he trying to break ground, or just share some thoughts on his first day? I
don't understand why there is an expectation that this blog post would be an
in-depth investigative journalism expose.

~~~
dschobel
Not an expose but maybe some information beyond "they have sensible security".

Unless you have some reason to care about tbray personally, the post is
basically useless.

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d_c
This feels like spam.

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aswanson
This topic is soooo 2003.

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yannis
_That’s what Google is. I mean, why can’t everyone lavish these sort of perks,
and this sort of environment, on their employees?_

Not all businesses scale well. Software is one of them. Once you develop them
the cost of adding more users - or selling more ads is virtually zero. Music
_was_ another. High speed trading maybe is also in this category.

The real world is outside Google:) Does anyone know how many employees are at
Googleplex or take a guess?

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Luyt
Interesting. I've read many horror stories about people wanting to get a job
at Google and going through the interview shredder.

Apparently, once you're in, it's a paradise. Well, at least compared to what
you had to go through.

~~~
cperciva
_going through the interview shredder_

My experience was that the interviews were easy and fun once my interviewers
got over the embarrassed "this is really stupid, but I'm supposed to ask you
this really trivial question...".

The recruiter I dealt with, on the other hand, was collossally incompetent,
and ranks among the top reasons why I declined Google's job offer.

~~~
btilly
That's sad.

After you join Google you never have to deal with the recruiter again and the
interviewers become fun people to work with.

OTOH an incompetent recruiter can result in a bad job offer and I can
understand why that could be a big negative.

~~~
cperciva
I think I got the right offer despite the recruiter's screwups; but you're
missing my point. Even if I never had to encounter that recruiter again, it
started me thinking "do I want to work for a company where people can
continually screw up and not get fired?"

~~~
btilly
Did you, in addition to not taking the offer, make sure that someone above
that recruiter knew about the issues described?

It is hard to fix problems if nobody reports them.

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cperciva
Yes. I asked to complete a survey about my interviewing experience, and I
wrote about my recruiter at great length. (I presume that someone read the
comments on those surveys...)

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tpz
Someone surely did read the comments: the recruiter and/or one or more members
of the HR department.

In all of the companies I have worked in as an employee or with as a
consultant, the HR department always has by far the weakest staff. I have also
observed that the number and degree of problematic staff in non-HR departments
is largely correlated with just how weak the HR department is. This makes
complete sense, of course, since it is the HR department that is supposed to
address such problems and it is the HR department which usually plays the
largest role in disciplinary decisions and firing decisions. The department
holding onto firing decisions will always have the weakest staff, and for the
simple reason that they aren't exactly going to fire themselves, now are they?
:) The rest of the company's staff problems simply fall out from that. Not
that I am suggesting that Google has notable staffing problems, rather simply
that no matter where you go, even Google, the HR department (or whichever
department in reality owns hire/fire, usually HR) will necessarily be the
weakest in the organization.

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josh33
What I really want to know is what "tbray" sees as the next google. Now that
he is inside he surely must have a different perspective on what could be
dislodging/game changing for the mammoth company.

~~~
neilk
No, unfortunately that's not going to happen. Instead, he's going to become
incapable of seeing any future of the internet other than "more Google".

This seems to happen to all their employees, with the exception of Brad
Fitzpatrick.

~~~
durin42
There's a good contingent internally that haven't drunk the kool-aid, Brad's
just the most visible externally. It's a reasonably huge effort just to keep
the hubris in check internally, and it doesn't always work out.

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dotBen
"Brad's just the most visible externally"

Which is the other problem... People enter Google and disappear from external
sight. I don't think Google has a "don't blog" policy, maybe it is that they
just see "google = internet" and decide there is no value in having a public
facing side.

I wonder whether this will happen to Tim

~~~
durin42
Many OSS contributors disappear because they're encountering satisfyingly
challenging engineering problems as their day job for the first time. It takes
a special discipline to actually _use_ 20% time at all (not because of team
pressure, just from the ease with which one can focus on the large problems at
Google). I've had that problem myself, and am considering putting said
discipline in my own written goals.

