At what point does working for Google (on anything released after 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?
Plus any company with a core business model of "being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.
Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just so they could make more money.
That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.
For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.
They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.
And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.
Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.
But after so many years of being jostled around and seeing every product I liked and used destroyed and brought back as something worse, I had to get off the train eventually. Google has no long-term plans. They only know how to ruin things that were once good. Android isn't the fun, open mobile OS it once was. It got more locked down with each update and became a cheap imitation of iOS. So eventually I just bought an iPhone. I went through so many messaging apps and renamings and relaunches of various products and services.
At some point you realize Google has no respect for their customers and no interest in making products that are nice to use. They only want to optimize people's attention so they can turn it into ad revenue. I celebrate their failures now, in hopes it'll one day shake something up enough that they'll have to try giving a shit for once.
I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.
It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.
What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.
It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn't, but it certainly feels like it.
1. It's not true. Read the [1]code of conduct, it's right there at the bottom: "And remember... don’t be evil"
2. Who cares if they say the words "don't be evil?" The actions are more important than a cute phrase. If they sent Google Ad Bots to every house in America and forced you to sit through 30 second ads every morning or else they shoot you, would you say "well at least the code of conduct says 'don't be evil'!"?
Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.
It is embarrassing. It's not just embarrassing, it's fucking embarrassing.
Google Stadia could have been enormously successful. What killed it? The same thing killing all manner of innovation in this country - poor broadband Internet service.
But... oh God, if only... if only Google had something they could use... something they could do to solve this problem!?
Oh... wait, yeah. They have their own fucking fiber ISP! Google could have ponied up money and started building out their fiber infrastructure massively, dumping whatever loads of cash were required, and they could easily have eaten up huge chunks of metro and suburban areas in America and might even be one of the leading ISPs in the nation.
But this speaks to the utter weakness and spinelessness of Google leadership up and down the entire chain. If you're stupid and/or naïve enough to think Comcast and Spectrum and Verizon and Charter and AT&T are just going to let you waltz in and steal their customers (and yes, these ISPs do think this way - you are THEIR customer - to be milked of money), you should never have entered into the ISP business in the first place. You have to throw sharp elbows. You have to gouge out eyes. You have to break bones. ISPs are ruthless.
If Google had been willing to sacrifice some of their profits for the past 12 years and bribe - sorry, """""""lobby""""""" all the necessary local, county, state, and federal officials - they could have moved in on all the shitty ISP's territories, laid down a ton of fiber, and might even have a majority control of Internet access both residentially and commercially.
But Google has long suffered from two overlapping problems: fear of failure and intolerance for anything less than instant success. The road to becoming America's best ISP will be a long, hard, miserable, expensive one for any company... but when you've got literally billions of dollars of cash at your disposal, you could throw the shit away on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors... or you could build something that would last for 50+ years and generate an enormous amount of revenue in a decade or two.
Too bad they're focused on short-term dipshit Wall Street investors.
Because calling people's job choices "embarrassing", no matter how right you may be, isn't a good starting argument against the people in those jobs. Not to mention that it comes off as pretentious.
Working at Google today, you better be in just for the 200k salary, because your options there are to sell ads or work on a product that's going to be shut down in a week.
It's like going to Harvard.
You don't want to advertise that you went to Harvard. People who attended Harvard not only admit this, they don't even actively proclaim they went to Harvard any longer. Why is that? Because a bunch of really shitty people have sullied the reputation.
It isn't that way with Google for the general public, but the SV folks know that Google of 2022 is nothing like Google of 2012, and certainly nothing like Google of 2002.
My great fear is that it won't be much longer before saying you work at Google in say, 2025-2032 is like saying you work at Hewlett-Packard or IBM in 2022. The prestige is long gone.
I've noticed people adapt to the demands placed on them, so highly encourage people to at least start out in a very demanding environment.
A nice distillation of most of SV these days.
Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.
Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.
Haha, imagine them shutting it down eventually.
Sad thing is they did not even have to do that. all they had to do was put some lobbying effort in empowering municipalities to do their own broadband and the rest would take care of itself. ISP monopolies have been kneecapping municipal broadband effort right and left and just some push from otherside would have cleared up the way for some competition. But they did not, as you said, its classic short term thinking and 'not my problem' syndrome. What really troubles me is that Google & FB have sucked up almost all of ad market but none of that revenue is trickling back into society except for these 'promotion packet' side hustles.