GM just making some fucking cars people want to buy. Nobody wants to look like a fat grandma driving a Tahoe or a racist uncle driving a Silverado lol.
I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.
I am a sysadmin and we will enable this. This is because many meetings discuss confidential or strictly confidential information that must not be leave the meeting. In-house, you would simply hand out papers that you collect before concluding the meeting. In Teams meeting it's not possible hence you block people from creating screenshots. This requirement comes from legal and compliance, and many other positions from CEO downwards.
The lede you're burying here is why a lot of this confidential info is so. Yes, protecting IP is important, but you're also primarily targeting whistle-blowers, abused employees, discriminated against employees, etc.
I mean, if HR says they won't make an accommodation because they think you're faking your disability than it's as if it never happened. Less transparency always benefits the immoral.
And this type of stuff does happen. A lot. We don't hear about it because:
1. Companies have gotten really good at just covering their tracks, like this.
2. It's a lot of effort to fight back and it's almost never worth it. You pretty much need baby killing material for someone to whistle blow. Lowly transgressions like discrimination aren't worth the effort.
I thought after Blizzard this would be a sort of wake up call.
I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!
But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.
In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.
But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings.
While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel.
Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.
What's the alternative? Does having a daycare for highly paid adults to dick around all day create innovation? You can't force creativity out of people no matter how much you pay them or how well you treat them.
The web is way more mature right now than 20 or even 10 years ago. There's way lass untouched niches waiting to be filled by the new killer product. And Google already owns the search market, the ads market, the smartphone market, the email market, the browser market, the maps market, and soon maybe AI market, etc. What new untapped multi billion market is left for them to conquer? The pond is already fished out at this point. So of course most Googlers are gonna have to be factory workers keeping the factory running instead of dicking around creating new useless things that bring in maybe no significant revenue. The days of Google & Co. spending billions on pipe dreams is over for now.
Innovation is at start-ups which Google then buys because it has ad revenue. People go to work at Google because it pays well and less headaches than working at startups, not because they're gonna invent something new.
> Does having a daycare for highly paid adults to dick around all day create innovation? You can't force creativity out of people no matter how much you pay them or how well you treat them
Google is proof that yes, it does create innovation. How many products and tools came out of people dicking around?
I think an aspect there is that Google nowadays has quite a backlog of stuff, which just needs maintenance. Established products which each have limited room for big innovation. And maintenance doesn't work well with goofing around. And finding the balance between having maintenance work done and doing new things is hard. (Just see their messenging solutions ...)
At the same time at their scale the measures of success are different. If a solution doesn't reach a huge audience it's quickly lost between the big products, while it might be profitable.
Back in the days an Orkut which served primarily Brazilian audience was okay, but compared to scale of Gmail, YouTube and Search (and the aimed reach of Google+) it was a distraction, not helping the core brand.
Just because it’s my best work doesn’t mean I created a database. I don’t work at Google so I don’t have access to their world class resources and knowledge. For me, my best work is furniture that I didn’t plan beforehand, I just had a general idea of the dimensions and purpose.
I was talking from the perspective of working for an employer, where you would get paid to dick around and need to provide a profitable output at the end to justify why dicking around is valuable to your employer. Not about your hobby work in your spare time since we all do nice things in our spare time, FOR US.
Why do you keep moving the goalposts towards you? The conversation was whether it's beneficial for the company to be paying workers to dick around at work in hopes they'll make something creative and highly valuable, not what creative things you do in your spare time.
I mean, you asked about examples I had, so I was being specific. I’m not here just to answer your questions, but to have a discussion, I don’t know why you’re being aggressive.
I don’t run a company, so I can’t tell you if dicking around would be worth it. I do know at the place I currently work they are making a new product based on some dicking around by another employee.
I lament the "more wood, fewer arrows" tgif, the weird Android guy (Rubin) having too much power, and the Emerald Sea (Gundotra) project for shifting Google to what it has become today
I've been on the outside since Sundar became CEO. I felt positive about him initially but have soured in recent years. I thought his background with Chrome was a great asset for setting company direction but lately it feels like the goal is to alienate consumers.
I'm with you here! I take lots of pictures. I picked up that stupid habit when I was a teenager with my family's digital camera. Eventually got a small canon for christmas and kept it in my pocket until I had a smartphone.
I'm not the kinda person to hold my camera up in the air filming a concert or whatever. But pictures of family! Pictures of random food I enjoyed or found cute. Pictures of random cute things in the store. Pictures of friends and cars and the beach and whatever else.
So much changes in the world. I love looking back at old pictures. During covid my mom and I would get together and dig through and find old stuff to post on facebook. It was a lot of fun.
I mean. I have pictures of random old cereal boxes I found amusing at the time. I have pictures I'm quite proud of, and others that just capture random happy moments.
I don't know what people mean about change? Things change a lot. People change, things change, the world changes. I have pictures of vegas casinos that were demolished years ago. Foods that aren't made anymore. I have a random picture of a quarter pounder meal from like 2005. Why not? XD
Those sorts of things cost me no time or effort really. Whipped out the camera real quick. Click. Put it away. Go back to enjoying my life. :)
When I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.
The other side of that is offering a ‘basically’ version out of respect for the listener, assuming they have more important things to do than listen to a detailed nerd-rambling of something they aren’t interested in. Listener/speaker can expand on the details or ask questions later, if needed.
It’s possible to mean it either way, or to hear it and interpret it either way.
This seems like a highly overwrought analysis where the adult formed a mental model, began assuming the motivations and intentions of others with certainty, and passed on this "lesson" a malleable mind who had no reason to debate it.
The idea that people use this word as a subtle/unintentional insult to others' intelligence rather than as a synonym for "essentially"... I just don't know how people arrive at such ungenerous conclusions so confidently.
>But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.
I find that's basically never the case and generally if they are playing some sort of status game, the entire conversation is condescending, so worrying about one normal phrase is pointless.
I prefer "essentially" ... pretty much the same meaning but it's more like a sign of respect "I'm summarising this point to its essence for brevity, as you are perfectly capable of filling in the blanks yourself".
Some cultures or regions use the word "basically" more frequently than others. And if there one thing I don't want to do is judging whole populations because of the way they traditionally use the language.
I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.
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