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Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoYou know, we used to have institutions for well-paid knowledge workers to cloister themselves from outside concerns and devote themselves to work. We called them "universities".
- skore 11y agoI heard some of those knowledge workers even went out into the broader industry and started highly successful businesses! I wonder how they feel about what started their careers, today...
- bobajeff 11y agoAre we still talking about college professors?
- dnc 11y agoRelated to this, great article of E.W.Dijkstra: The strengths of the academic enterprise (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...)
- DanAndersen 11y agoIt really is a shame that modern academia has broken the promise of what it used to be, and what it still (often falsely) claims to be. With so many prospective academics and so few tenured positions, academia becomes a cutthroat fight to accumulate more publications at whatever cost in order to build up one's career. Lack of funding sources leads to many people fighting over a shrinking piece of the pie. Those who are funding give initial funding to multiple groups with the goal of continuing funding whoever is most impressive -- everyone wants a good return on their investment. As a result, there's a tendency to only focus on the next progress report, focusing on short term results that are visible and can get media attention. This leads to a focus on salesmanship and less on actually figuring things out. Academia had a specific set of pros and cons that made it a distinct entity from industry. As time as passed, academia has been taking on more and more of the cons of industry (focus on short-term thinking) without taking on the pros of industry (higher pay).
- nextos 11y agoExactly, many modern universities (even top 10 ones) are sadly quite broken. Extremely inefficient usage of funds, loads of bureaucrats for no good reason, and loads of people that just optimize for number of papers. These tend to stick around doing politics to get their names well-placed in the paper du jour, despite not having done much for it. Math, and to a lesser extent physics & CS departments are less broken. But applied sciences places where I have been tend to be a trainwreck.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago"Well paid"? Not so much.
- ams6110 11y agoLooking strictly at salary maybe not, but the entire package of benefits, retirement, paid time off, near-impossibility of being fired, etc. is far from the worst.
- michaelochurch 11y agoI heard a manager at Google admit that he gave the shittiest work to state-school grads, not because they were less capable (they weren't, and he admitted as much) but because the Ivy Validation (as in Google being the Ivy League of your 20s) meant a lot more to them than it did to people coming from Harvard or Stanford. I don't intend for this to reflect on Google (he was a level 7 or 8, not a person of significance) as I'm sure that this dynamic exists, to the same degree, at all the hot tech companies.
- douche 11y agoIt sounds like Mountain View is being a huge pain in the ass... Maybe it's because I grew up in a redneck area that had no zoning or building codes, but the idea that the government can tell you that you can't build what you want on property that you own is infuriating.
- spiritplumber 11y agoWell, it makes sense if you want to build, say, a gasifier or a chemical factory... but it doesn't seem to be the case. Are they worried about environmental impact, social impact, or just tax revenue
- dyoo1979 11y agoThere's resistance for things you'd imagine should be no-brainers. For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance: http://www.cyclelicio.us/2015/sunnyvale-nimbys-threaten-stevens-creek-trail-extension/ http://www.cyclelicio.us/2015/sunnyvale-nimbys-threaten-stev... Cooperation is hard work.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago> For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance But how could you not love that bike path!? It gets you practical places and it's beautiful! My God, fucking NIMBYs.
- ams6110 11y agoIn the context of the entire population, very few enjoy biking. Maybe they object to spending a ton of money on something that benefits a very small percentage of the population.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoGiven the hell that is morning traffic on the 101, the bicycle path is actually the easier and more pleasant commute alternative for a lot of people. Before claiming that only "a very small percentage of the population" benefit, we should look for numbers on how many people actually do use the bike path.
- gamesbrainiac 11y agoThis is eerily similar to what Cadbury did for its workers and employees.
- jacques_chester 11y agoI'm reminded of the observation that when a company declares a plan to build a giant, glorious new headquarters, it is time to sell your shares of that company. The theory being that it marks an outbreak of hubris and will distract the upper management for years.
- patmcguire 11y agoI don't know if the theory explained the mechanism behind it, merely the correlation. There's simple regression to the mean, or the fact that you have to achieve a certain level of success to build one of these glorious headquarters, and that seems to be around the natural limit for company size.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoYes; The Edifice Complex.
- deleted_account 11y agoDoes anyone else consider these massive corporate arcologies short sighted? I mean, they're literally walling themselves off from the community under gigantic glass domes, an absurd design given the peninsula's mild Mediterranean climate. Couldn't they consider something more, I don't know, _permeable_? Though I have to admit the cyberpunk in me relishes the day we have smooth, windowless Googlecars shuttling 'plexmonks through automated checkpoints guarded by robotic Brinhounds.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 11y agoAs someone who lives in a Mediterranean climate, I certainly wouldn't have minded a dome over the college campus I attended. There's nothing fun about having to walk under intense rain between buildings, whose floors get all muddy if you have any kind of walkable grass. And I don't see what it has to do with their connection to the community; after all, people don't exactly come flying in. Whether the campus will have outside visitors will have more to do with their policies (free or restricted entry, presence of public amenities, etc) than with the dome, in my opinion.
- LogicFailsMe 11y agoAll that comes to mind is "Larry-5 report to Carousel."
- olivermarks 11y agoOracle's hard drive styling of their silicon valley hq on Ralston road looks very dated now...suspect the google architecture will look very odd in 20 years time
- seanp2k2 11y agoEh, I think many people still get that it's the "database" icon. http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31784/what-is-the-origin-meaning-of-the-icon-used-for-database http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31784/what-is-the-orig...