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I'm not seeing any "generosity" on Google's part, at least from the examples you provided. You certainly seem like a smart guy, working on some cool stuff, so

I'm not seeing any "generosity" on Google's part, at least from the examples you provided. You certainly seem like a smart guy, working on some cool stuff, so I'm not surprised people are a bit confused (hence the term "brainwashed") by your (pretending to?) not understand the business model of the company you work for. You are giving your time away, for free, to a for profit corporation. That's so irrational it's painful to hear. If you like working with google systems and resources so much that you are willing to pay your employer to use them then ok, that's a bit weird, but it's your time. If you feel you need to work 120% time to keep your career on track then ok, that's not uncommon in this industry (but it's the opposite of generosity and it's not sustainable for you). Framing this as repaying Google for "their extreme generosity" is delusional, which is why I'm assuming it's not the real reason.

maigret 13y ago
- He gets to work on what he probably considers to be much more "interesting than average" projects. - He's building a reputation of innovator in the company, which is certainly not bad for the next promotion or raise. - He's sure well paid and doesn't need to risk his own wealth. - He's out of the paper stuff and can concentrate on the technical side. Of course, that way he misses the "get insanely rich" possibility of startups. The "famous" part no so much, you can get that in a big corp as well...
dekhn 13y ago
I worked in Ads for a year when I started here. I understand the business model of my company quite well :-) And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free". Free as in free beer- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre I'm certainly not "giving my time away for free": to be clear, I'm a salaried worker, and I choose to work the hours I do. Further, to be clear: Google gives me immense resources to carry out life-saving scientific research, the intellectual property of which belongs to scientists (and the general public), not Google.
- freshhawk 13y ago
  > And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free" And you would join a large number of people who have recently started using that word to mean "can cost any amount in anything of value as long as it's not currency". So sure, it's "free" in that way and still not free in the definition of the term that's actually useful to people. Boring semantic argument, let's drop it. As to the rest, this is a much better way of phrasing it than in terms of Google's "generosity", which is what I was pointing out as flawed.
nostrademons 13y ago
Not the OP, but I just launched a Google-owned open-source project that was developed partly during 20% time and partly during my personal time, so I can share some of my reasoning why I would do this. I was a startup founder before Google. I called the shots on what I'd work on, owned all the code I produced, and worked when and how I wanted to. A large part of my motivation for writing all this code was to learn things; another large part was to produce stuff that would be a positive contribution to the world. Alas, nobody used my stuff (well, almost nobody - we had a userbase measured in the hundreds), and I didn't get paid for it. So it wasn't exactly sustainable. In my official job duties, I now write software that's seen by over a billion users. In my unofficial job duties, I'm the maintainer of an active open-source project watched by thousands of people which gets a dozen or so patches per week. When testing this open-source library, I had free availability of thousands of machines and a corpus of billions of documents. When developing it, I had the help and mentorship of experienced coworkers, some of whom had help leadership roles in major open-source projects. I get paid a fat salary for this. I do work longer hours, but it hasn't come at the expense of things I really care about. I go out with friends 3-4 times a week. I have a steady girlfriend. I call my mom every week. Most of the time for this has come out of loafing around on Reddit and Hacker News, where you are also giving your time away, for free, to produce something of value for a for-profit corporation. In pretty much every dimension I care about, this is a win for me. My software reaches more users. I learn more. I get paid more. I meet more interesting people, and have more of a social life. My professional reputation increases more. I get more experience. It used to bug me that I was giving away my labor "for free" to my employer, who would then profit handsomely for me. But what I realized is that not all labor has equal value. I used to reap all the fruits of my labor, and those fruits were worth virtually nothing. I'm now in a position where my labor has dramatically more leverage, and much of that is because I use the resources of my employer, and they're entitled to take a cut of it for that reason. When the time comes where I feel I can accomplish more outside of Google than inside it, I'll quit. That was what drew me to them in the first place, the realization that, as an entrepreneur, all the ideas I had would be better executed as features of existing Google products. If that ever reverses and something that I really want to do would be better accomplished as an individual startup, that's what I'll do.
- 13y ago

maigret 13y ago

- He gets to work on what he probably considers to be much more "interesting than average" projects. - He's building a reputation of innovator in the company, which is certainly not bad for the next promotion or raise. - He's sure well paid and doesn't need to risk his own wealth. - He's out of the paper stuff and can concentrate on the technical side. Of course, that way he misses the "get insanely rich" possibility of startups. The "famous" part no so much, you can get that in a big corp as well...

dekhn 13y ago

I worked in Ads for a year when I started here. I understand the business model of my company quite well :-) And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free". Free as in free beer- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre I'm certainly not "giving my time away for free": to be clear, I'm a salaried worker, and I choose to work the hours I do. Further, to be clear: Google gives me immense resources to carry out life-saving scientific research, the intellectual property of which belongs to scientists (and the general public), not Google.

freshhawk 13y ago
> And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free" And you would join a large number of people who have recently started using that word to mean "can cost any amount in anything of value as long as it's not currency". So sure, it's "free" in that way and still not free in the definition of the term that's actually useful to people. Boring semantic argument, let's drop it. As to the rest, this is a much better way of phrasing it than in terms of Google's "generosity", which is what I was pointing out as flawed.

nostrademons 13y ago

Not the OP, but I just launched a Google-owned open-source project that was developed partly during 20% time and partly during my personal time, so I can share some of my reasoning why I would do this. I was a startup founder before Google. I called the shots on what I'd work on, owned all the code I produced, and worked when and how I wanted to. A large part of my motivation for writing all this code was to learn things; another large part was to produce stuff that would be a positive contribution to the world. Alas, nobody used my stuff (well, almost nobody - we had a userbase measured in the hundreds), and I didn't get paid for it. So it wasn't exactly sustainable. In my official job duties, I now write software that's seen by over a billion users. In my unofficial job duties, I'm the maintainer of an active open-source project watched by thousands of people which gets a dozen or so patches per week. When testing this open-source library, I had free availability of thousands of machines and a corpus of billions of documents. When developing it, I had the help and mentorship of experienced coworkers, some of whom had help leadership roles in major open-source projects. I get paid a fat salary for this. I do work longer hours, but it hasn't come at the expense of things I really care about. I go out with friends 3-4 times a week. I have a steady girlfriend. I call my mom every week. Most of the time for this has come out of loafing around on Reddit and Hacker News, where you are also giving your time away, for free, to produce something of value for a for-profit corporation. In pretty much every dimension I care about, this is a win for me. My software reaches more users. I learn more. I get paid more. I meet more interesting people, and have more of a social life. My professional reputation increases more. I get more experience. It used to bug me that I was giving away my labor "for free" to my employer, who would then profit handsomely for me. But what I realized is that not all labor has equal value. I used to reap all the fruits of my labor, and those fruits were worth virtually nothing. I'm now in a position where my labor has dramatically more leverage, and much of that is because I use the resources of my employer, and they're entitled to take a cut of it for that reason. When the time comes where I feel I can accomplish more outside of Google than inside it, I'll quit. That was what drew me to them in the first place, the realization that, as an entrepreneur, all the ideas I had would be better executed as features of existing Google products. If that ever reverses and something that I really want to do would be better accomplished as an individual startup, that's what I'll do.

13y ago