6 ms·

Google putting up fence and gate to keep execs from leaving

71 points by foemmel 19y ago

xirium 19y ago
From the article: It's not a company, it's a cult, and frankly I can appreciate that because we're a cult too Satirising two large companies so comprehensively in one sentence is brilliant.
staunch 19y ago
> There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. I've been saying this for a long time and I really believe it. At least borderline evil. It seems to me there's nothing doing more damage to (web) technology than Google hording many (most?) of the world's greatest hackers and severely under utilizing their abilities.
- noonespecial 19y ago
  I've been thinking tis in the back of my mind for a while too without it ever really taking words. This hit it spot on. There's something a little bit "Hunt Brothers cornering the market" about google, isn't there?
- hernan7 19y ago
  If it means that TV gets a smaller share of the advertisement $$$, I would say it's not evil at all.
- dissenter 19y ago
  Have to agree. The same sentence caught my attention. I can only speak for the East Coast, and in microeconomic terms, but Google has definitely put a hurt on the market here. They are worse than all of the banks put together. The cream of the crop here---people who are too smart to veg out in a bank---are more than willing to go to Google, when they would otherwise be furthering some smaller and more important project, be it a startup, or just something else useful and in real need of a bright, computer-oriented mind. They're all funneling into Google. Google got them all right out of college, and they're probably going to keep them. You cannot argue that we are better off this way. Google certainly is, but as a whole we are going to lose out. Clumping all those people together is not going to improve technology. It's going to make it worse, because there's a huge opportunity cost in taking all these people and sticking them in a mill. That's just how software works. If they were out in little groups in a lot of different areas, they could be making a huge difference. Google doesn't need 10,000 engineers who know Bellman-Ford and Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Miller-Rabin. It's too much overlap. And Google certainly isn't providing offerings in a quantity great enough to justify the overlap. They've hired well---too well---and now they're going to be having a great number of these people performing well below where they would if they were arbitraged out to somewhere else. The benefit of adding just one of these engineers to a smaller shop is incalculably higher than the benefit of giving him to Google. That efficient asset allocation, and the providing of liquidity, have been grossly exaggerated in terms of their benefit to society in order to justify the poaching Wall Street does each year, is a truth generally acknowledged. Trading makes a few people much richer, but it does not make us richer, not in equal part. In fact, if you want to get nasty about it, the latest round of bailouts is costing us a great deal... Now we've traded the Wall Street problem for the Google problem. Do we really need the top sliver of our graduates working on destructively taking market share from PayPal? Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created? Or contributing to an advertising arms-race at a growth rate much higher than that of the underlying market? What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? I feel like if it was anything suitable I would've already heard of it by now.
  - dhouston 19y ago
    at least in my experience @ mit, google has become the safe post-college default, like microsoft was before it. hell, facebook has even started to take that crown. the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before. the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)
  - mechanical_fish 19y ago
    What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? The most likely possibility is that there isn't one. Google is a company built by academics with Ph.D.s who were so successful, so fast, right out of school that they've concluded that the secret to life is being a Ph.D.-level academic. Believe me, that's a serious occupational hazard among those of us with that much education. It's the classic trap. You're constantly tempted to fall back on the fallacy that anything you spent so much of your time on must be intrinsically valuable. So they've built a think tank. It's no better or worse than other think tanks, like the MIT Media Lab or Xerox PARC or Bell Labs or Agilent Labs or IBM's old labs. Like those institutions of yore, Google milks its enormous cash cow and uses the money to fund pie-in-the-sky projects. Some of those projects will eventually change the world... perhaps after their creators leave Google and found startups. Others of those projects will circle round and round forever. Still others don't amount to anything, but because their inventors are under very little pressure -- why fire them, when you can just ask the cash cow for another $2 million to keep them on staff? -- they persist. I think it's a mistake to assume that most of the Googlers are working on "destructively taking market share from Paypal". Google's core assets work too well to be the product of a giant committee. I'm guessing that the technical portion of the SEO-fighting arm of Google is just a dozen people, with perhaps another two dozen assistants. Another huge group of people is sales reps and customer service and other things that don't scale well. Most of the rest of Google is a giant research organization, dedicated to searching all of known phase space for the next cash cow. If they find it before the current cow gives out, Google gets another 20 years of profits. If not, Google will eventually explode. Sometimes that strategy works. From the outside, it really is eerily similar to the early days of Apple Computer. Apple was much crazier, in fact: In the early '80s they were rolling in cash and therefore had absolutely no incentive to impose fiscal discipline. They reportedly ran open-loop, without a budget, for several years. The company was a free-for-all collection of quasi-independent projects that sometimes contradicted each other. And that very nearly doomed them to be squashed by IBM... except that, whoops, one of those tiny one-person pie-in-the-sky research projects was the guy working on the Macintosh. Then Steve Jobs found that guy, seized the project, and it became 12 people working to ship the Macintosh. And eventually the Mac became the next cash cow that bought the company another 20 years. But sometimes your think tank is Xerox PARC, and it becomes most famous as a place where brilliant engineers get all their training and practice before eventually quitting in disgust and founding the startups that actually make all the money. There's real danger that Google will follow that route. Caring and feeding for a think tank is a difficult job, one that Google's founders aren't necessarily cut out for. It's not like they're magically immune to the Peter Principle. We shall see. But I wouldn't worry that the Googlers are wasting their time. History suggests that frustrated think-tank refugees can be incredibly productive startup founders. They have Things to Prove.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
- immad 19y ago
  Hmm, I feel the sentiment. But this is more of a problem with the world rather than something Google is at fault for or evil because of it. Brainpower is sucked to where the money is and thats not necessarily the best place for it to be for the greater good. I guess you could say Google is evil if it was doing it under false pretenses
- gms 19y ago
  Are they sheep? These "hackers" are free to work wherever they want, you know. No one is forcing them to make this choice.
Aries 19y ago
THE BEGINING OF THE END
Tichy 19y ago
I didn't get the tire shredders joke, what does it mean?
- joshwa 19y ago
  http://www.soacorp.com/traffic_control/tire_shredder.htm http://www.soacorp.com/traffic_control/tire_shredder.htm
  - Tichy 19y ago
    Ah OK - I thought it was a device for shredding old tires... So I guess it is meant to keep the employees from driving away.
- hernan7 19y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Tire-Damage-Might-Giants/dp/B000009NTL http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Tire-Damage-Might-Giants/dp/B00...
Tichy 19y ago
I wonder if fakesteve readers in general tend to be happy people, or unhappy people...
bayareaguy 19y ago
There's nothing special about Google here. Sure some people want to go there purely for the culture but I bet most have enriching themselves as their top priority. Particularly higher ups like Douglas Merrill. The recent drop in GOOG prices probably left him with a ton of options that are underwater.

71 points by foemmel 19y ago

From the article: It's not a company, it's a cult, and frankly I can appreciate that because we're a cult too Satirising two large companies so comprehensively in one sentence is brilliant.

staunch 19y ago

> There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. I've been saying this for a long time and I really believe it. At least borderline evil. It seems to me there's nothing doing more damage to (web) technology than Google hording many (most?) of the world's greatest hackers and severely under utilizing their abilities.

noonespecial 19y ago
I've been thinking tis in the back of my mind for a while too without it ever really taking words. This hit it spot on. There's something a little bit "Hunt Brothers cornering the market" about google, isn't there?
hernan7 19y ago
If it means that TV gets a smaller share of the advertisement $$$, I would say it's not evil at all.
dissenter 19y ago
Have to agree. The same sentence caught my attention. I can only speak for the East Coast, and in microeconomic terms, but Google has definitely put a hurt on the market here. They are worse than all of the banks put together. The cream of the crop here---people who are too smart to veg out in a bank---are more than willing to go to Google, when they would otherwise be furthering some smaller and more important project, be it a startup, or just something else useful and in real need of a bright, computer-oriented mind. They're all funneling into Google. Google got them all right out of college, and they're probably going to keep them. You cannot argue that we are better off this way. Google certainly is, but as a whole we are going to lose out. Clumping all those people together is not going to improve technology. It's going to make it worse, because there's a huge opportunity cost in taking all these people and sticking them in a mill. That's just how software works. If they were out in little groups in a lot of different areas, they could be making a huge difference. Google doesn't need 10,000 engineers who know Bellman-Ford and Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Miller-Rabin. It's too much overlap. And Google certainly isn't providing offerings in a quantity great enough to justify the overlap. They've hired well---too well---and now they're going to be having a great number of these people performing well below where they would if they were arbitraged out to somewhere else. The benefit of adding just one of these engineers to a smaller shop is incalculably higher than the benefit of giving him to Google. That efficient asset allocation, and the providing of liquidity, have been grossly exaggerated in terms of their benefit to society in order to justify the poaching Wall Street does each year, is a truth generally acknowledged. Trading makes a few people much richer, but it does not make us richer, not in equal part. In fact, if you want to get nasty about it, the latest round of bailouts is costing us a great deal... Now we've traded the Wall Street problem for the Google problem. Do we really need the top sliver of our graduates working on destructively taking market share from PayPal? Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created? Or contributing to an advertising arms-race at a growth rate much higher than that of the underlying market? What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? I feel like if it was anything suitable I would've already heard of it by now.
- dhouston 19y ago
  at least in my experience @ mit, google has become the safe post-college default, like microsoft was before it. hell, facebook has even started to take that crown. the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before. the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? The most likely possibility is that there isn't one. Google is a company built by academics with Ph.D.s who were so successful, so fast, right out of school that they've concluded that the secret to life is being a Ph.D.-level academic. Believe me, that's a serious occupational hazard among those of us with that much education. It's the classic trap. You're constantly tempted to fall back on the fallacy that anything you spent so much of your time on must be intrinsically valuable. So they've built a think tank. It's no better or worse than other think tanks, like the MIT Media Lab or Xerox PARC or Bell Labs or Agilent Labs or IBM's old labs. Like those institutions of yore, Google milks its enormous cash cow and uses the money to fund pie-in-the-sky projects. Some of those projects will eventually change the world... perhaps after their creators leave Google and found startups. Others of those projects will circle round and round forever. Still others don't amount to anything, but because their inventors are under very little pressure -- why fire them, when you can just ask the cash cow for another $2 million to keep them on staff? -- they persist. I think it's a mistake to assume that most of the Googlers are working on "destructively taking market share from Paypal". Google's core assets work too well to be the product of a giant committee. I'm guessing that the technical portion of the SEO-fighting arm of Google is just a dozen people, with perhaps another two dozen assistants. Another huge group of people is sales reps and customer service and other things that don't scale well. Most of the rest of Google is a giant research organization, dedicated to searching all of known phase space for the next cash cow. If they find it before the current cow gives out, Google gets another 20 years of profits. If not, Google will eventually explode. Sometimes that strategy works. From the outside, it really is eerily similar to the early days of Apple Computer. Apple was much crazier, in fact: In the early '80s they were rolling in cash and therefore had absolutely no incentive to impose fiscal discipline. They reportedly ran open-loop, without a budget, for several years. The company was a free-for-all collection of quasi-independent projects that sometimes contradicted each other. And that very nearly doomed them to be squashed by IBM... except that, whoops, one of those tiny one-person pie-in-the-sky research projects was the guy working on the Macintosh. Then Steve Jobs found that guy, seized the project, and it became 12 people working to ship the Macintosh. And eventually the Mac became the next cash cow that bought the company another 20 years. But sometimes your think tank is Xerox PARC, and it becomes most famous as a place where brilliant engineers get all their training and practice before eventually quitting in disgust and founding the startups that actually make all the money. There's real danger that Google will follow that route. Caring and feeding for a think tank is a difficult job, one that Google's founders aren't necessarily cut out for. It's not like they're magically immune to the Peter Principle. We shall see. But I wouldn't worry that the Googlers are wasting their time. History suggests that frustrated think-tank refugees can be incredibly productive startup founders. They have Things to Prove.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
immad 19y ago
Hmm, I feel the sentiment. But this is more of a problem with the world rather than something Google is at fault for or evil because of it. Brainpower is sucked to where the money is and thats not necessarily the best place for it to be for the greater good. I guess you could say Google is evil if it was doing it under false pretenses
gms 19y ago
Are they sheep? These "hackers" are free to work wherever they want, you know. No one is forcing them to make this choice.

Aries 19y ago

THE BEGINING OF THE END

Tichy 19y ago

I didn't get the tire shredders joke, what does it mean?

joshwa 19y ago
http://www.soacorp.com/traffic_control/tire_shredder.htm http://www.soacorp.com/traffic_control/tire_shredder.htm
- Tichy 19y ago
  Ah OK - I thought it was a device for shredding old tires... So I guess it is meant to keep the employees from driving away.
hernan7 19y ago
http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Tire-Damage-Might-Giants/dp/B000009NTL http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Tire-Damage-Might-Giants/dp/B00...

Tichy 19y ago

I wonder if fakesteve readers in general tend to be happy people, or unhappy people...

bayareaguy 19y ago

There's nothing special about Google here. Sure some people want to go there purely for the culture but I bet most have enriching themselves as their top priority. Particularly higher ups like Douglas Merrill. The recent drop in GOOG prices probably left him with a ton of options that are underwater.