11 ms·

My take would be Google can afford it for now because they have a web ad monopoly and don’t have to compete. If they ever lose that, the culture they’ve built

My take would be Google can afford it for now because they have a web ad monopoly and don’t have to compete. If they ever lose that, the culture they’ve built will cause them to be destroyed and irrelevant in not that much time. For now, it’s summer.

lhorie 6y ago
I recall watching a news report as a teen about how things used to be pretty chill at Microsoft at its heyday. These days it doesn't seem to have a monopoly on much of anything, but it can still crank out interesting projects. It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.” Good retention policy does provide value to users. -- > "When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses." +1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that. > "We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein. That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.
    - vletal 6y ago
      I like how living in the close proximity to the city center might seem somehow special from the perspective of suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a norm in Europe.
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who has the biggest disadvantage to brag about. Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher? Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.
      - ghaff 6y ago
- freebee16 6y ago
  that happened after nadella changed course from the balmer years. It is not always the case that a new CEO can turn around the company (for example see GE).
  - devchix 6y ago
    See also SUNW. McNealy imported the 6Sigma thing from GE, at one time it infected even teams not involved in manufacturing. MSFT had the best outcome for giants of the aughts. It is too bad OpenSolaris was left for dead, otherwise we'd have some choices and competition in *nix OS. AIX, dead. HP-UX, dead. Can't recall the DEC, Ultrix? Who runs that anymore. The last time I saw BSD commercially used was at a telco.
    - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
      A lot of my early jobs were porting various Unix things to Linux. I spent time writing cross platform C++, perl, and bash on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UNIX, and DEC Tru46, but mostly Solaris and IRIX. I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages were anemic. GNU/Linux won because if something sucked, somebody somewhere would fix it. By the early 2000s, and especially after Linux 2.6, it was obvious closed-source UNIX was both worse and overpriced. Even now it seems like the best part of the closed source MacOS Unix stack is the open source homebrew/macports stuff.
      - devchix 6y ago
        Agree with you that tooling was abysmal but all of those *nix had their bright flowering that subsequently pollinated other *nixes. AIX service management (SRC I think?) eventually saw life in Solaris as SMF. BSD jails reborn as containers. The HP-UX had batch job management that was very good. Solaris ABI/API compat between versions was exemplary, you can count on the OS upgrade not breaking your application. When the compiler was still being sold (thousands of dollars by the seat license), it was optimized for the SPARC processor and outperformed same code compiled by the GNU compiler. I wish we had all of that still. Apropos of the "curated App Store" or "free-for-all" discussion currently active, I remember talking to a colleague in the early 2000s that Apple with its curated BSD-derivative OS was exactly what open sourced OSes needed. Users don't want to do more work than necessary; in retrospect, the selling point that users can do anything+everything with *nix OS was the wrong message. You didn't mention package management and network booting to be pain points. They were nightmares, which Linux eventually solved. I think that's where the race was lost.
- kamilszybalski 6y ago
  Microsoft has, imo, a monopoly of sorts on two critical pieces. 1. Its ability to permeate Enterprise, 2. Its channel strategy/network. What comes to mind most recently? See Slack.
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  MSFT is still known for good WLB. Just check places like Blind to get an idea of the corporate culture of a company. There are certainly hard teams/jobs at MSFT but it seems on average that the WLB at MSFT is super good.
- eigenvector 6y ago
  Wasn't Microsoft widely regarded as a bit of a meat grinder in the Ballmer days due to stack ranking?
knuthsat 6y ago
You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely anything and these companies exist forever.
- bsaul 6y ago
  in my personnal experience, the only kind of companies that are really comfortable to employees (in terms of perks) and adopt a slow rythm, are benefiting from some kind of monopolistic, regulatory situation. Either public sector companies, or banks & insurance whose business model can't be disrupted that easily because of regulatory pressures. Giant IT companies from the valley that successfully built a way to lock down users are the other example.
  - sorisos 6y ago
    could also be a niche market product created a decade ago that some other large company depends on. money keeps rolling in with little effort. source: personal experience. the company is no longer in operation but it lasted for a god 30 years.
    - kazen44 6y ago
      another example is a company which is highly specialised in making a certain thing. (for instance some kind of widget for a specific kind of industrial machine). usually demand is stable enough to keep the company healthy for a long time, but scale up is not necessary because the demand isn't there.
- throwmeaway_66 6y ago
  This is something that was unknown to me until a few years ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week). Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up people ridiculing the typical Google senior-and-up IC who works 30-35 hours a week with weekends off, I say to myself: that's crazy, what would they think of me working (barely) 1/3 of those hours? Would I be the village idiot? There is always some drops fear trying to find a way up my limbic system whispering to me that one day this will be over. One day, I will have to work for real again and I will have to pass tough interviews and have new, possibly demanding bosses. But this has been going for more than 4 splendid years, very long-termism tend to make one's life pretty dull, and my dream is to open a bicycle shop anyway. As a famous ad campaign used to suggest: "Think different".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
izacus 6y ago
Except that Google was known for all these perks, 20% time (I wonder what this guy would think about someone wasting ONE DAY A WEEK for something not on his project?!), good food, etc. pretty much since inception. Isn't that why so many people flocked there to work in the first place?
- abdabab 6y ago
  I’d say most people flocked there for prestige and compensation. Perks were just icing on the cake.
kv_hrishikesh 6y ago
How many employees do the FAANGs have ? Must be above 100K spread over the world. Even 5K talented engineers are enough for all the (admittedly superb) software they build and sell. With those profits still up, the rest of the employees can just be coasting along, endlessly arguing about things.

lhorie 6y ago

I recall watching a news report as a teen about how things used to be pretty chill at Microsoft at its heyday. These days it doesn't seem to have a monopoly on much of anything, but it can still crank out interesting projects. It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.

fossuser 6y ago
Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.” Good retention policy does provide value to users. -- > "When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses." +1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that. > "We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
- ghaff 6y ago
  I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein. That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.
  - vletal 6y ago
    I like how living in the close proximity to the city center might seem somehow special from the perspective of suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a norm in Europe.
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who has the biggest disadvantage to brag about. Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher? Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.
    - ghaff 6y ago
freebee16 6y ago
that happened after nadella changed course from the balmer years. It is not always the case that a new CEO can turn around the company (for example see GE).
- devchix 6y ago
  See also SUNW. McNealy imported the 6Sigma thing from GE, at one time it infected even teams not involved in manufacturing. MSFT had the best outcome for giants of the aughts. It is too bad OpenSolaris was left for dead, otherwise we'd have some choices and competition in *nix OS. AIX, dead. HP-UX, dead. Can't recall the DEC, Ultrix? Who runs that anymore. The last time I saw BSD commercially used was at a telco.
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    A lot of my early jobs were porting various Unix things to Linux. I spent time writing cross platform C++, perl, and bash on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UNIX, and DEC Tru46, but mostly Solaris and IRIX. I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages were anemic. GNU/Linux won because if something sucked, somebody somewhere would fix it. By the early 2000s, and especially after Linux 2.6, it was obvious closed-source UNIX was both worse and overpriced. Even now it seems like the best part of the closed source MacOS Unix stack is the open source homebrew/macports stuff.
    - devchix 6y ago
      Agree with you that tooling was abysmal but all of those *nix had their bright flowering that subsequently pollinated other *nixes. AIX service management (SRC I think?) eventually saw life in Solaris as SMF. BSD jails reborn as containers. The HP-UX had batch job management that was very good. Solaris ABI/API compat between versions was exemplary, you can count on the OS upgrade not breaking your application. When the compiler was still being sold (thousands of dollars by the seat license), it was optimized for the SPARC processor and outperformed same code compiled by the GNU compiler. I wish we had all of that still. Apropos of the "curated App Store" or "free-for-all" discussion currently active, I remember talking to a colleague in the early 2000s that Apple with its curated BSD-derivative OS was exactly what open sourced OSes needed. Users don't want to do more work than necessary; in retrospect, the selling point that users can do anything+everything with *nix OS was the wrong message. You didn't mention package management and network booting to be pain points. They were nightmares, which Linux eventually solved. I think that's where the race was lost.
kamilszybalski 6y ago
Microsoft has, imo, a monopoly of sorts on two critical pieces. 1. Its ability to permeate Enterprise, 2. Its channel strategy/network. What comes to mind most recently? See Slack.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
MSFT is still known for good WLB. Just check places like Blind to get an idea of the corporate culture of a company. There are certainly hard teams/jobs at MSFT but it seems on average that the WLB at MSFT is super good.
eigenvector 6y ago
Wasn't Microsoft widely regarded as a bit of a meat grinder in the Ballmer days due to stack ranking?

knuthsat 6y ago

You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely anything and these companies exist forever.

bsaul 6y ago
in my personnal experience, the only kind of companies that are really comfortable to employees (in terms of perks) and adopt a slow rythm, are benefiting from some kind of monopolistic, regulatory situation. Either public sector companies, or banks & insurance whose business model can't be disrupted that easily because of regulatory pressures. Giant IT companies from the valley that successfully built a way to lock down users are the other example.
- sorisos 6y ago
  could also be a niche market product created a decade ago that some other large company depends on. money keeps rolling in with little effort. source: personal experience. the company is no longer in operation but it lasted for a god 30 years.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    another example is a company which is highly specialised in making a certain thing. (for instance some kind of widget for a specific kind of industrial machine). usually demand is stable enough to keep the company healthy for a long time, but scale up is not necessary because the demand isn't there.
throwmeaway_66 6y ago
This is something that was unknown to me until a few years ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week). Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up people ridiculing the typical Google senior-and-up IC who works 30-35 hours a week with weekends off, I say to myself: that's crazy, what would they think of me working (barely) 1/3 of those hours? Would I be the village idiot? There is always some drops fear trying to find a way up my limbic system whispering to me that one day this will be over. One day, I will have to work for real again and I will have to pass tough interviews and have new, possibly demanding bosses. But this has been going for more than 4 splendid years, very long-termism tend to make one's life pretty dull, and my dream is to open a bicycle shop anyway. As a famous ad campaign used to suggest: "Think different".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

izacus 6y ago

Except that Google was known for all these perks, 20% time (I wonder what this guy would think about someone wasting ONE DAY A WEEK for something not on his project?!), good food, etc. pretty much since inception. Isn't that why so many people flocked there to work in the first place?

abdabab 6y ago
I’d say most people flocked there for prestige and compensation. Perks were just icing on the cake.

kv_hrishikesh 6y ago

How many employees do the FAANGs have ? Must be above 100K spread over the world. Even 5K talented engineers are enough for all the (admittedly superb) software they build and sell. With those profits still up, the rest of the employees can just be coasting along, endlessly arguing about things.