
Leaving Google - antichaos
http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html
======
iamelgringo
Google is indeed a tightly walled garden. Hackers & Founders has been holding
events 4 or 5 miles away from Google headquarters in Mountain View for several
years. And, out of their 25,000 employees. We only get a handful of engineers
that show up. And when they arrive, they quickly realize that H&F involves
having a beer or two and geeking out about startups. The Googlers often can't
geek out because of heavy NDA's, and are very concerned about loose lips after
having a beer or two. So, they often stop showing up.

I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on
startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are
very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a
software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when
your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information).

Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers &
Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months.
Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in
(via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what
I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got
buzzed in the door.

I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about
what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in
town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA.

So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire"
meme attached to you.

Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at
H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3
years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to
startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.

~~~
nostrademons
I suspect I'm one of those Googlers who used to go but stopped showing up. :-)

Anyway, I think your perception is basically accurate, at least in my limited
experience. Google is the wrong place to go if you're interested in working on
a startup on the side. Between the draconian "all your IP are belong to us",
the intellectual demands of your day job, and the numerous opportunities to
try out interesting side projects under the Google umbrella, the path of least
resistance is usually just to do your side-projects as Google-owned 20% time.

It _can_ be a good place to learn a whole bunch of technical, leadership, and
product skills and _then_ do a startup. Google's quite a bit more open
internally than most big companies, so you're exposed to a lot more than you
would be at another large corporation, and possibly even more than in a
startup. There are specialists in performance, accessibility,
internationalization, security, and all these other tricky corners that
startups typically muddle through, and the quality of documentation on how to
handle those is much better than you'll generally find on the web. You get
daily experience with scaling, such that thinking about how to build scalable
solutions becomes second-nature. You're often directly involved in product
decisions, and can see how your choice fare in the real world. You have a wide
variety of hard UX data at your fingertips; much of this is cutting edge
applied psychology, and isn't available anywhere else.

I think we're starting to see a trickle of Xooglers leaving the mothership and
founding their own things. I know at least 6 of them personally, plus there're
posts like this blog entry. In general, I think this is a very good thing for
the Valley startup ecosystem, just like how Fairchild spawned almost all of
Silicon Valley in the 60s, and Xerox PARC spawned much of the rest of the
modern computer industry in the 70s.

It's kinda ironic that Google is totally open for users, but is a walled
garden for employees. Meanwhile, Facebook is a walled garden for users, but is
relatively open about letting employees publish and open-source
infrastructure. (Actually, that's perhaps an unfair comparison: Google is also
really open about letting employees open-source infrastructure, the problem is
that Google culture tends to result in re-use of core proprietary
infrastructure, such that when it comes time to open-source the software, it's
impossible to disentangle from the parts that definitely can't be open-
sourced.) Meanwhile, Microsoft is now relatively open for both employees _and_
users, but is a walled-garden for _developers_.

~~~
iamelgringo
What can I say, we miss ya :)

------
drgath
"[Google's culture] has led to many innovations - from the search first
homepage, to the NoSql movement, powering webmail by Ajax ..."

C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for
webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded.

Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it
difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these
types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage?
Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.

~~~
eropple
This is more common than most folks seem to think. I've noticed the curious
delusion in talking to acquaintances where ABMers who stridently complain
about Microsoft innovations and tools insist that XHR "doesn't count because
Google made it popular."

When gently informed (not reminded--most of the ones I know have never touched
Outlook in their lives) that Outlook Web Access was the reason XHR was
_invented_ , the response so far has invariably been "but that doesn't count,
because it's Microsoft."

I somewhat chalk it up to the "cool factor" that surrounds Google, but a good
part of it may just be ignorance.

~~~
nostrademons
I think it was actually Google Maps that made XHR popular, not GMail. With
GMail, people figured that the AJAX-interactivity was cool, but not
groundbreaking. With Maps, it opened up fundamentally new interaction models
that didn't exist before.

This is somewhat ironic, since Maps didn't use XHR at all, and instead used an
iframe transport. For that matter, "AJAX"-enabled Google Search also uses an
iframe and contains no XML. Monikers are weird.

~~~
cousin_it
A draggable tiled map doesn't require XHR _or_ iframes. It's a bunch of img
tags next to each other, and some JavaScript that sets their src and position.

~~~
nostrademons
The other interactions do, though, eg. the results changing as you drag the
map.

------
antichaos
Part 1: <http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html>

Part 2: [http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-
part-2.ht...](http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-part-2.html)

------
nandemo
This is not news. Google's got 20,000 employees. Statiscally, every day a non-
famous googler leaves Google. And that post doesn't tell us anything about
Google that we didn't already know.

~~~
bigbang
I believe they had 20,000 employees few years back. Now it should be much
more, if not twice that.

~~~
jordinl
I spoke to a googler and she told me they were 25K at the beginning of the
year and looking to hire 20% more...

------
mark_l_watson
Wow, who needs to justify leaving a job after 7 years? Good read though and
the author's new business looks cool. Although I often repeat and work for the
same bosses again, I have always tried to work no more than 1 to 3 years with
a group/team/company. Now, with a large company like Google (similar in size
to SAIC where I was for 20 years, off and on), switching teams/divisions, etc.
helps mix up the work experience but still getting fresh jobs is simply a good
life strategy. BTW, It is easy enough to maintain long term friendships even
if you don't work with people anymore.

------
afterburner
I've been following douweosinga's blog since before he joined Google,
interesting to see he's moving on. Part 2 is a little more interesting than
the first.

He linked to this, though, which I didn't know about, and seems at first
glance to be very useful and neat: <http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/>

------
001
Why do people bash so much about the company when they are leaving ? Is it
they want to become famous all of sudden ? Why don't people accept that big
companies won't be like the same company when it got started.

~~~
nostrademons
I was talking to a friend who works at Yahoo today. She's feeling terribly
overworked and unproductive mostly because of some boneheaded organizational
practices. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like she has pretty much
accepted that management is brain-dead.

At Google, there's a culture that if something is broken, _call it out_ so
that it can be fixed. At best, you will save thousands of employees hundreds
of hours. At worst, you'll learn _why_ it's broken. Many problems are inherent
in running a large company, and there is no easy fix for them. But many others
have simple solutions that make everyone's lives better.

The way I see it (and this is completely my personal opinion here, _not_
speaking for Google), he and other Xooglers who've written posts like this are
being Googley. You don't work for seven years at a company without absorbing
some of the culture, and that culture doesn't simply leave when you hand in
your badge. Posts like this are not all that different from something you
would see on internal Buzz or mailing lists, and I think the spirit of them is
not to "bash" Google, but to call out things that Google could improve upon
even after the Xoogler has left.

~~~
rachelbythebay
Bash? No. Try to fix? Absolutely.

Ever watch a friend slowly slip away? They change from something you knew to
something unrecognizable. You have to at least try to do something about it.

~~~
intranation
Speaking as an ex-Yahoo!, I have to say that with a company that big, with
that many external commercial deals, and that many layers of management:
effecting change as you see it is so non-trivial as to odds-on be a waste of
your time. Additionally, trying and failing is actually quite demoralising.

~~~
nostrademons
I do think it's significantly more difficult at Yahoo than at Google. Google
has a very much bottom-up culture. If you want to try something different, get
the support of your manager and peers, and then just go do it. If it turns out
to work significantly better, people in other parts of the organization will
notice, and copy it. Pretty soon the whole company will be doing it whether or
not Larry blesses it.

The introduction - and then pervasiveness - of unit tests was one such change
that basically took over Google culture despite the ambivalence of the
founders. People found they could simply move faster when they had confidence
in their code, they started sharing the knowledge of how to write better
tests, and eventually it simply became the accepted thing to do.
(Interestingly, the testing intergrouplet failed several times before they
struck on a bottom-up approached that worked. As with everything, persistence
is important inside big companies too.)

------
ansy
On a side note, Triposo looks pretty good. There are some problems with the
wikipedia text sometimes being in the city's native language though. I'm not
sure if maybe that's how the page was when you scraped it.

