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Comment by Wonnk13 | Hacker News Reader

Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it (acknowledging I'm only one of nearly 150k employees) was basically IBM with better food.

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I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving.

That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.

In companies of this size it takes decades to expire from the mortal blow. All the while investors crowd around and give reassurances of a full recovery. Always optimize for the long-term.

> For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so

It was February 11, 2011 in Tahrir Square. That, as far as I can tell, was the place and moment where 'tech' changed.

Governments and other organizations were very rudely shaken awake by how 'tech' had just toppled an otherwise stable government at a key choke point of a populous country. How all this newfangled communications tech and silly meme culture came together out of seemingly nowhere and threatened everything.

After Tahrir Square, every government and agency and whatever else saw tech as a very powerful and possibly threatening 'thing'. And they slowly but surely managed to change 'tech', work with it, get hired in it buy it off, and make it and themselves more to their liking and plans. The adolescence was over.

Tahrir Square was when the suits woke up and then went to work in 'tech' because everyone could see that was the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square#2011_revolution

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