6 ms·

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company

by gkanai 1y ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.

makeset 1y ago
Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."
- mschuster91 1y ago
  I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
  - op00to 1y ago
    IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
  - Croak 1y ago
    I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
    - Gormo 1y ago
      Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
      - mastax 1y ago
        "Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.
        Gormo 1y ago
        Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.
        mastax 1y ago
        Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
        Gormo 1y ago
        I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers. I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
  - Avalaxy 1y ago
    That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs. Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share? And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too. For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail. Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
    - cogman10 1y ago
      HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.
      - xadhominemx 1y ago
        That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
  - sofixa 1y ago
    > IBM Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
- adam_hn 1y ago
  You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.
  - cudgy 1y ago
    Ageism?
  - stillworks 1y ago
    His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.
    - chipsrafferty 1y ago
      Being a driver is "living his life"?
      - DanielHB 1y ago
        If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...
      - Apocryphon 1y ago
        Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.
      - stillworks 1y ago
        Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement. He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund. Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities. Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been. I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do. Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
- nickdothutton 1y ago
  In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?
    - tim333 1y ago
      They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)
  - nharada 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
  - giardini 1y ago
    So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England? https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-institute-expansion-2025/ https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i... https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-five-billion-cloud-infrastructure-2025-03-17/ https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site. They're also privately held, which makes a difference. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical-campus-a-world-away-from-wall-street-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical... This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek. https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.epic.com/visiting/ https://www.epic.com/visiting/
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly. You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…
  - makeset 1y ago
    Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
I feel the same way. The question that arises is: How can you potentially spot which companies are about/likely to enter a 'golden era' when you interview there? What questions could surface some sort of likelihood? Is it possibly to identify them before they enter the 'golden era'?
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  You have to be involved with making it golden: they don't have ride-alongs
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Sure, that makes sense. But in order to know what places/communities/organizations are worth getting involved with, that has the right base conditions at least, how to identify those? Not every place has the same likelihood I'd wager, but based on what?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer (household name, but I don't like to mention it in postings). One of the top-Quality manufacturers in the world. I worked as a peer with some of the top engineers and scientists in modern optics (and often wanted to strangle them). I worked there for almost 27 years. The pay was mediocre. The structure and process would drive a lot of folks here, into fits. But they consistently and routinely produced stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that people would stake their entire careers on. Stuff that some folks would assume was impossible to make. They have thousands and thousands of hard-core patents. I felt pride for working there. My business card opened a lot of pretty amazing doors. It's disappointing to see the stuff that folks here post, when I mention it. It almost seems as if people think I'm exaggerating or outright lying or boasting. I'm not. There are places that foster greatness; simply by being a place that has a long culture of accomplishment. I was just someone that stood on the shoulders of giants, and I was lucky to have the experience. That said, I think some of their managers made some big mistakes, and they took a drubbing, but I will bet that they are already getting back on their feet. They are really tough. They weathered being bombed in World War II, and multiple depressions and recessions.
mosburger 1y ago
Yeah, see also: Digital Equipment Corp until the mid 90s (where I did my co-op). Lots of brilliant people there, coasting on their legacy until they fell hopelessly behind from mismanagement and bloat. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of it at the end.

by gkanai 1y ago

makeset 1y ago

Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."

mschuster91 1y ago
I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
- op00to 1y ago
  IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
- Croak 1y ago
  I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
    - mastax 1y ago
      "Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.
      - Gormo 1y ago
        Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.
        mastax 1y ago
        Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
        Gormo 1y ago
        I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers. I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
- Avalaxy 1y ago
  That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs. Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share? And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too. For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail. Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.
    - xadhominemx 1y ago
      That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
- sofixa 1y ago
  > IBM Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
adam_hn 1y ago
You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.
- cudgy 1y ago
  Ageism?
- stillworks 1y ago
  His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.
  - chipsrafferty 1y ago
    Being a driver is "living his life"?
    - DanielHB 1y ago
      If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...
    - Apocryphon 1y ago
      Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.
    - stillworks 1y ago
      Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement. He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund. Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities. Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been. I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do. Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
nickdothutton 1y ago
In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.
- walthamstow 1y ago
  Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?
  - tim333 1y ago
    They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)
- nharada 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
- giardini 1y ago
  So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England? https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-institute-expansion-2025/ https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i... https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-five-billion-cloud-infrastructure-2025-03-17/ https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site. They're also privately held, which makes a difference. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical-campus-a-world-away-from-wall-street-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical... This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek. https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.epic.com/visiting/ https://www.epic.com/visiting/
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly. You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
- WD-42 1y ago
  Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…
- makeset 1y ago
  Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

I feel the same way. The question that arises is: How can you potentially spot which companies are about/likely to enter a 'golden era' when you interview there? What questions could surface some sort of likelihood? Is it possibly to identify them before they enter the 'golden era'?

devnullbrain 1y ago
You have to be involved with making it golden: they don't have ride-alongs
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Sure, that makes sense. But in order to know what places/communities/organizations are worth getting involved with, that has the right base conditions at least, how to identify those? Not every place has the same likelihood I'd wager, but based on what?
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer (household name, but I don't like to mention it in postings). One of the top-Quality manufacturers in the world. I worked as a peer with some of the top engineers and scientists in modern optics (and often wanted to strangle them). I worked there for almost 27 years. The pay was mediocre. The structure and process would drive a lot of folks here, into fits. But they consistently and routinely produced stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that people would stake their entire careers on. Stuff that some folks would assume was impossible to make. They have thousands and thousands of hard-core patents. I felt pride for working there. My business card opened a lot of pretty amazing doors. It's disappointing to see the stuff that folks here post, when I mention it. It almost seems as if people think I'm exaggerating or outright lying or boasting. I'm not. There are places that foster greatness; simply by being a place that has a long culture of accomplishment. I was just someone that stood on the shoulders of giants, and I was lucky to have the experience. That said, I think some of their managers made some big mistakes, and they took a drubbing, but I will bet that they are already getting back on their feet. They are really tough. They weathered being bombed in World War II, and multiple depressions and recessions.

mosburger 1y ago

Yeah, see also: Digital Equipment Corp until the mid 90s (where I did my co-op). Lots of brilliant people there, coasting on their legacy until they fell hopelessly behind from mismanagement and bloat. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of it at the end.