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kerng

Back when Google was really cool! Who got hired into some of these positions?

View on HN

I'm guessing they either left or are millionaires many times over by now and don't surf HN

Why wouldn't a millionaire read tech news and discussion, especially if they were previously interested in it?

Well, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul for one (although I think it may have been a year later)

I almost did. My professor would become Google's director of research and when she did she encouraged me to send a CV as I was about to finish my degree in C.S. I sent it but didn't get hired. Maybe I was just not Google material (i.e.: not good enough) but the official answer I got was that they were focussing on hiring U.S. residents at that point which I wasn't.

It was also harder to hire outside of the US back then, so the latter may be more likely.

I remember reading stories from the era following this (maybe the late 2000's) where getting hired by Google was incredibly difficult. As in "You're already a superstar, waste 6 months of your time going through a complicated and disorganized process, and still get rejected" difficult. Made me wonder how they actually managed to hire anyone, let alone thousands of employees.

https://www.businessinsider.com/first-google-employees-where...

Which is funny, because actually, their business model was never "really cool", just "evil" ;)

Google were not "evil" for a long time after this. They really were a force for good in the world for a long time. I have never admired a large company so much as I did the Google of the early 2000s. Youthful, gifted, moral, crazily ambitious, constantly doing things I thought impossible…

The "evil" only really crept in once they started to take over all of the world's advertising.

So they were “not evil” as long as they were being funded by investors and didn’t have a self sustaining business plan...

What was it, again, that we refer to as "the root of all evil"?

It’s the love of money....

This is a common pattern that companies follow; make a good product now, make money later. Many products become crappy and companies go sour when they turn this corner.

If a profit seeking company makes a product that isn’t profitable, how can it be considered “good”?

What if it provides positive value for whole society ?

I'm speaking from a user/customer's perspective.

Even from a user’s perspective, if a product is not profitable, it will either disappear or the company will have to do something user-hostile to achieve profitability.

I like simple business models. I give the company money and they give me stuff.

What exactly is evil about their deal with advertisement?

Google were not as "evil" when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in charge. Nowadays, the moral standard is very low.

They're still in charge.

Sundar Pichai is in charge.

He serves at the discretion of Google's parent company, Alphabet, of which Page and Brin are CEO and President respectively.

If you think that's when "evil" crept in, you really should think again how "evil" works - or, how would you implement and scale such a business model. Hint: long before they even started taking over the world of ads. The goals were defined at the beginning.

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