Google putting up fence and gate to keep execs from leaving

the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before.

the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)

The most likely possibility is that there isn't one. Google is a company built by academics with Ph.D.s who were so successful, so fast, right out of school that they've concluded that the secret to life is being a Ph.D.-level academic. Believe me, that's a serious occupational hazard among those of us with that much education. It's the classic trap. You're constantly tempted to fall back on the fallacy that anything you spent so much of your time on must be intrinsically valuable.

So they've built a think tank. It's no better or worse than other think tanks, like the MIT Media Lab or Xerox PARC or Bell Labs or Agilent Labs or IBM's old labs. Like those institutions of yore, Google milks its enormous cash cow and uses the money to fund pie-in-the-sky projects. Some of those projects will eventually change the world... perhaps after their creators leave Google and found startups. Others of those projects will circle round and round forever. Still others don't amount to anything, but because their inventors are under very little pressure -- why fire them, when you can just ask the cash cow for another $2 million to keep them on staff? -- they persist.

I think it's a mistake to assume that most of the Googlers are working on "destructively taking market share from Paypal". Google's core assets work too well to be the product of a giant committee. I'm guessing that the technical portion of the SEO-fighting arm of Google is just a dozen people, with perhaps another two dozen assistants. Another huge group of people is sales reps and customer service and other things that don't scale well. Most of the rest of Google is a giant research organization, dedicated to searching all of known phase space for the next cash cow. If they find it before the current cow gives out, Google gets another 20 years of profits. If not, Google will eventually explode.

Sometimes that strategy works. From the outside, it really is eerily similar to the early days of Apple Computer. Apple was much crazier, in fact: In the early '80s they were rolling in cash and therefore had absolutely no incentive to impose fiscal discipline. They reportedly ran open-loop, without a budget, for several years. The company was a free-for-all collection of quasi-independent projects that sometimes contradicted each other. And that very nearly doomed them to be squashed by IBM... except that, whoops, one of those tiny one-person pie-in-the-sky research projects was the guy working on the Macintosh. Then Steve Jobs found that guy, seized the project, and it became 12 people working to ship the Macintosh. And eventually the Mac became the next cash cow that bought the company another 20 years.

But sometimes your think tank is Xerox PARC, and it becomes most famous as a place where brilliant engineers get all their training and practice before eventually quitting in disgust and founding the startups that actually make all the money. There's real danger that Google will follow that route. Caring and feeding for a think tank is a difficult job, one that Google's founders aren't necessarily cut out for. It's not like they're magically immune to the Peter Principle.

We shall see. But I wouldn't worry that the Googlers are wasting their time. History suggests that frustrated think-tank refugees can be incredibly productive startup founders. They have Things to Prove.

Do we really need PayPal in the first place? We had credit card companies already, and eBay had its own offering before PayPal. Hell, do we really need Google? Alta Vista was already here, why did we need another search engine? All that competition is just "destructive" "duplication".

Or maybe the reason why we have duplication is that some people like one service better. Other people call duplication "competition", and on net it has done a lot of good for this world. Each company tries to get better than the other, and we all win (except for the companies competing, sometimes). This process is what Schumpeter called "creative destruction".

But maybe you're right, and competition is destructive. Maybe we should just appoint ONE company to have a monopoly on each product in the marketplace. Should we abolish Apple, which is just "destructively" copying Microsoft? Should we draw-and-quarter anyone caught running Linux? Does that sound like a better world?

>Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created?

So, is the problem competition or monopoly?

You have very strong opinions on where other people choose to work and who should be able to hire them. It sounds like you just want a really bright person or group of people to assign all the tech grads to jobs. Similar things have been tried before, and the outcome wasn't too good.

2. What you don't seem to realize is that the existing college curriculum in almost all US colleges, including the ivy league ones, do not correctly prepare a student for a real software engineering environment. Sure it's nice to learn all about algorithms and patterns and all that stuff, but until you actually dive into being part of a million-line project, you don't really know what it's like. Google is providing valuable real-world training to these freshies, using throw-away projects, well except sometimes one of those throw-away projects becomes something real and important. They also are creating a new generation of elite programmers who are setting new expectations in the marketplace such as:

        a. Only technical people should manage technical people.
        b. Programmers should be given the freedom to innovate and exercise their creativity.
        c. Programmers should be pampered and treated to luxury so that they don't have to worry about anything other than coding.

3. There are already TONS of startups started by ex-googlers, so in short, what I see, is not that Google is sucking up all this smart talent and then wasting them on creating ad-space. What I see is Google is gathering all this untrained potential, adding engineering discipline and high expectations from employers, and then letting them loose to spawn their own innovations.

4. In my personal experience, jealousy and whining makes you feel better temporarily, but they don't really solve any problems and they just keep you stuck in your current mode so that you forget to look for real solutions to your real problems. When you are a child, if you fall down and start crying, your mommy or some other adult will come over and pick you up and make you feel better again. When you become an adult you have to pick yourself up.

Google is the seemingly invincible Tyrant. It had the foresight to see that computer science would soon be extinct if programmers were allowed to continue working for large mindless corporations. It hires Gholas (I mean programmers) for their skills, but who are increasingly suspicious of the uses their skills are put to. When at last the Tyrant dies, the programmers will scatter, never again willing to work for a big company.