To bring some positive news, I bought this computer last month and up to now I'm quite happy with it.
TouchPad feels very good but is a little buggy when the computer rest on some surfaces.
The function keys are not a pain to use, and the keyboard feels very good otherwise.
I installed Fedora and Windows 10 on it. Bought with Ubuntu for the price reduction.
Oled screen is marvelous, battery life is okay: 5h when developing using vscode and tons of extensions. It does get quite hot when doing some 3d stuff but that's expected I guess.
Battery life can be improved by choosing the LCD screen.
It has some flaws, but I find them minor and I value much more the possibility to have a windows Linux dual boot.
On the other hand in my current company we have people from all over the world: US, EU, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Everything is asynchronous, flat hierarchy, only seniors hired as freelancers though, so quite autonomous people. Two dev syncs per week, fine if you skip one for whatever reason. One single manager for 10 people. It works quite well.
More likely that Google engineers are in a bubble because of all the available internal tools. Also the interview process nowadays select people that have time to train for the interviews rather than good engineers. The Google interview is still hard, but not for the same reasons than in early 2010.
This. Their interview process selects people who have hundreds of hours to blow to practice on stupid competitive coding, aka LeetCode. These aren't people who are innovative, they're ones that know how to grind.
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Googles strategy is to find innovative people who can code well, but it's way easier and faster to determine the latter. So they hire a TON of people with these interviews and then wait for the sharp and innovative ones to float up while the not so innovative ones stay at L4.
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
It all boils down to the fact that people need to feel useful. This is part of the society as a whole. During this meetings, look at who need attention, and praise their propositions.
On some rare cases it is a power move, in such cases either you can play the power game or you can't.
Regarding power games, the real fight happen before the meeting, so if you feel unprepared and you know someone in power is going to pressure you: don't go.
In 2016 Google News was great because with a 5 minutes glance you coudl hved all the necessary news. However this strategy doesn't work anymore thanks to Google News trying to be smart by adapting news to your browsing history.
I haven't been able to find a good alternative to the old Google News.
I tried subscribing to one or many newspapers, but they all have too many useless articles inbetween valuable news such that filtering noise takes too much time.
So in the end I still read Google News but I'm getting a sens of negativity and frustration that wasn't there in 2016. And it takes more time to have all the necessary news. Since "Time spent on Google News" is probably an important metric for Google, the situation is not going to improve anytime soon.
I don't really understand where this comes from, if you're glancing at the news then the "Headlines" mobile app tab (or the "Top Stories" section in the website) is actually un-personalized. Google News explicitly pushes personalization in the separate and aptly named "For You" section.
What did you like about the "old Google News"? A good number of comments here seem to have a similar sentiment, so I'm genuinely curious. Was it simply the aggregation without personalization?
Well, you can still right click on an image preview in Google Image and then select "Show Image" to get the image in full resolution, like the good old "View Image" button.
There is of course a middle ground between 'writing for writing' and 'writing for payback'. For instance people might want to post how they did some stuff, with the hope that it helps at least one guy. That's how most blog were written.
Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.
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