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Comment by makeset | Hacker News Reader

Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."

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In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index

Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site.

They're also privately held, which makes a difference.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...

This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek.

https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929

https://www.epic.com/visiting/

So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England?

https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i...

https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...

Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?

They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)

You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.

His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.

Being a driver is "living his life"?

Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement.

He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.

Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.

Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.

I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.

Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.

Driving a taxi may increase your IQ. It increases the size of your brain. Also taxi drivers have healthier brains (less Alzheimer's):

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-taxi-drivers...

Macguire's original study on taxi drivers:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10716738/

BTW it's Fall! So here's to memories - "Four Strong Winds" written by Ian Tyson, sung by Neil Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnylI_9rmcs

Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.

If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...

Ageism?

He might not have been an engineer.

One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly.

You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.

Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…

Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"

I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.

I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s.

Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.

>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.

I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.

One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.

Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.

Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.

Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.

Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...

"Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.

Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.

Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).

I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers.

I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.

>Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates

They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?

"The internet itself" isn't a vendor that one obtains specific services from.

Fair enough, and neither are users paying customers. It's all middleman at this point.

A middleman is a specific party that mediates the relationship between two other parties. An aggregated system that everyone is using but no one in particular is in control of is not a middleman in the sense applicable here.

> IBM

Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.

That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.

Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs.

Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share?

And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.

That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too.

For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.

Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.

HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.

That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.

IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.

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