4 ms·

People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry c

People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit. When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible. Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like. All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that. The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.

tech_tuna 3y ago
I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds. Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google. Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft. tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.
mlrtime 3y ago
You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions. Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
We've seen the vilification of the MBA types over the past decade and a half as a downstream effect too. The technical types always had a distaste, but now it's bled into the mainstream and amplified by the ongoing economic conditions. As the monetary value of Internet-driven services grew, it tilted power to the doers in technical fields. The disrupters in the industry weren't the product people anymore, it was the engineers making things.

tech_tuna 3y ago

I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds. Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google. Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft. tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.

mlrtime 3y ago

You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions. Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.

a_vanderbilt 3y ago

We've seen the vilification of the MBA types over the past decade and a half as a downstream effect too. The technical types always had a distaste, but now it's bled into the mainstream and amplified by the ongoing economic conditions. As the monetary value of Internet-driven services grew, it tilted power to the doers in technical fields. The disrupters in the industry weren't the product people anymore, it was the engineers making things.