4 ms·

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of

by zcw100 6y ago

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of the diaspora (I dislike this term). Tons of former X, pick your popular Silicon Valley company, employees with little else to sell other than that they worked foe x company. The vain CEO hires them hoping that they’ll sprinkle some magic fairy dust on their dysfunctional company. Never mind that the reason it’s disfunction is because the CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr. Our intrepid developer constantly mumbles “we’ll at x we used to do whatever.” Afraid that the CEO will realize that the fairy dust is just a combination of cool aid and glitter starts throwing people under the bus and the knives come out.

nvarsj 6y ago
Yes... It's a huge pet peeve of mine when recruiters, companies, tools, say something like "written by ex-googlers", "work with ex-googlers", etc. Like it means anything at all that you have an engineer from a company w/ 100k employees. It's absolutely meaningless. And you see it all the time, especially in link-bait Hacker News headlines.
mav3rick 6y ago
Did you even read the article ? It's incredibly well written with pros and cons of each tool. I know you have a hatchet to bury against Google but why don't you read the article first.
- zcw100 6y ago
  Why are you carrying water for Google? I did read the article and yes it does have some good parts.
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    I carry water to douse the flame you hold.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I have one experience with that. Guy, late 20's or early 30's at best, ex-Googler joins a bank and becomes CTO. Pushes for them to replace Angular (which they went all in on, migrating from a set of JQuery UI components) with, drumroll, Polymer. Nothing finished yet, performance issues (because guess what, polymer's routing turned out to be pretty much the same as a 'tab panel'), aaand Polymer 2 rolls around, backwards incompatible. Scramble to make all their components suitable for Polymer 2, and they're just about to sigh a breath of relief aaaaand polymer 3 rolls around and becomes deprecated in favor of lit-html at the same time. Moral of the story: Ex-Google doesn't mean shit, and don't force the use of experimental technology for your whole fucking multi-billion company. They should've stuck with Angular, it's fine, or migrate to React instead which has / is becoming an industry standard.
- dessant 6y ago
  One of my worst decisions as a developer was to build upon a component framework maintained by Google. Material Components for the web is constantly introducing breaking changes that make building upon the framework a nightmare. Lately they've even set this expectation in the project description. The problem is that the components are rather buggy, so you must regularly update them to have upstream bugs fixed. > Material Components Web tends to release breaking changes on a monthly basis, but follows semver so you can control when you incorporate them. We typically follow a 2-week release schedule which includes one major release per month with breaking changes, and intermediate patch releases with bug fixes. https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... The development team's decisions have been questionable [1][2][3], so consider this a warning in case you are tempted to use the project. [1] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/4799#issuecomment-551537015 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... [2] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/2865 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... [3] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/2639 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...
  - Tyr42 6y ago
breck 6y ago
I agree that it isn't a perfect predictor of future success, but it is a free indicator that carries a decent amount of signal. And I would encourage anyone who loves the field IMO should have a goal to do a stretch at one of the big ~5 (an internship may be enough). I speak as someone who was very anti-big tech until 2014 when someone convinced me to get my head out of the sand. Your technical abilities can still improve (as long as you keep practicing yourself, because dev speed will slow down at a big org), you will gain tons of practice working with a lot of talented people, but irreplaceably you will understand more about how the industry is piloted.
tolbish 6y ago
It is called cargo cult culture [0]. The idea is to succeed by replicating what other successes have done. The problem is that from the outside, we only see how the successes got where they are in a superficial way. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
alisonkisk 6y ago
> CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr. Thats pretty close to the Google story.
- appehuli 6y ago
  didn't understand.

by zcw100 6y ago

nvarsj 6y ago

Yes... It's a huge pet peeve of mine when recruiters, companies, tools, say something like "written by ex-googlers", "work with ex-googlers", etc. Like it means anything at all that you have an engineer from a company w/ 100k employees. It's absolutely meaningless. And you see it all the time, especially in link-bait Hacker News headlines.

mav3rick 6y ago

Did you even read the article ? It's incredibly well written with pros and cons of each tool. I know you have a hatchet to bury against Google but why don't you read the article first.

zcw100 6y ago
Why are you carrying water for Google? I did read the article and yes it does have some good parts.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  I carry water to douse the flame you hold.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I have one experience with that. Guy, late 20's or early 30's at best, ex-Googler joins a bank and becomes CTO. Pushes for them to replace Angular (which they went all in on, migrating from a set of JQuery UI components) with, drumroll, Polymer. Nothing finished yet, performance issues (because guess what, polymer's routing turned out to be pretty much the same as a 'tab panel'), aaand Polymer 2 rolls around, backwards incompatible. Scramble to make all their components suitable for Polymer 2, and they're just about to sigh a breath of relief aaaaand polymer 3 rolls around and becomes deprecated in favor of lit-html at the same time. Moral of the story: Ex-Google doesn't mean shit, and don't force the use of experimental technology for your whole fucking multi-billion company. They should've stuck with Angular, it's fine, or migrate to React instead which has / is becoming an industry standard.

dessant 6y ago
One of my worst decisions as a developer was to build upon a component framework maintained by Google. Material Components for the web is constantly introducing breaking changes that make building upon the framework a nightmare. Lately they've even set this expectation in the project description. The problem is that the components are rather buggy, so you must regularly update them to have upstream bugs fixed. > Material Components Web tends to release breaking changes on a monthly basis, but follows semver so you can control when you incorporate them. We typically follow a 2-week release schedule which includes one major release per month with breaking changes, and intermediate patch releases with bug fixes. https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... The development team's decisions have been questionable [1][2][3], so consider this a warning in case you are tempted to use the project. [1] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/4799#issuecomment-551537015 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... [2] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/2865 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... [3] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web/issues/2639 https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...
- Tyr42 6y ago

breck 6y ago

I agree that it isn't a perfect predictor of future success, but it is a free indicator that carries a decent amount of signal. And I would encourage anyone who loves the field IMO should have a goal to do a stretch at one of the big ~5 (an internship may be enough). I speak as someone who was very anti-big tech until 2014 when someone convinced me to get my head out of the sand. Your technical abilities can still improve (as long as you keep practicing yourself, because dev speed will slow down at a big org), you will gain tons of practice working with a lot of talented people, but irreplaceably you will understand more about how the industry is piloted.

tolbish 6y ago

It is called cargo cult culture [0]. The idea is to succeed by replicating what other successes have done. The problem is that from the outside, we only see how the successes got where they are in a superficial way. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

alisonkisk 6y ago

> CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr. Thats pretty close to the Google story.

appehuli 6y ago
didn't understand.