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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.

> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else

At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

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> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.

I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.

I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation.

at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.

It's stifling.

I got into programming because I enjoyed programming. My first "real" job was not in FAANG, just some small company with about 2 other developers. And it was great, I had a lot of fun, I got to work with great technology and try new things.

Then I got lured into FAANG for the $$$ and free food. Now it's boring. There's no room to innovate. I'm not allowed to make any big decisions or play with fun technology. What's left? I enjoy my TC and that gets me through the day. You can't blame folks for focusing on TC when there's no innovation to be had.

Yeah I get the impression that people don't take as much pride in their work for its own sake anymore - more assembly line worker than master craftsman.

From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.

I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.

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