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It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could liter
by Jach 1y ago
It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.
The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)
In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
- josephg 1y agoYeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites. If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoI am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.
- josephg 1y agoI’ve worked there. They certainly aren’t all geniuses. But there are a huge number of brilliant engineers there - many of whom spend their lives schleping protobufs around for a fat paycheck. It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.
- yellow_postit 1y agoBreaking up Google would likely result in many great new businesses being built if that talent pool was shoved out of their comfort zones.
- anukin 1y agoThe current crop of googlers are largely normal and it’s hard to find exceptionally talented engineers until you meet an l7 and up. The faang engineers as exceptional engineers is largely marketing to attract experienced engineers to join faang at below average market rates.
- Jach 1y agoI've had the lucky position to be able to think positively about a lot of the tech and gaming layoffs in the last couple years for pretty much this reason -- that we'll eventually look back on them as unleashing a lot of previously locked up potential. On the other hand there are people at google and elsewhere who get paid to do important maintenance work, not requiring much innovative thinking, but if they leave/are laid off that work just stops happening, and something valuable is lost. On the other other hand, if AI keeps getting better at a similar pace as the last 5 years, none of this will matter on global economy-doubling timelines of ~15 years.