Google Reader Founder: I Never Would Have Founded Reader Inside Today's Google

I don't think it was a wrong decision either--hence the quotes. I think it was not easy to pull it off outside Google.

>> I see somebody saying that Google is different today from when it was back when he first made Reader

I do not deny that there might have been a fundamental culture change at Google. My point, precisely, is that a culture change is orthogonal to the fundamental fact that at someone else's company, they have the ultimate control over your invention. That's one big reason people go (and went) start start-ups. This is what has never changed and it's the employee's fault if they do not realize this when they accept their employment offer.

>> Clearly you're a fan of this new culture

I've never accepted an offer from Google. What I said does not necessarily imply that I'm a fan of the internal culture, or would have liked new Google management better if I were an employee. I am assessing the overall vision of Google leadership and their output from the outside and believe they are doing a very good job, and the credit for a company doing well should first and foremost go to the utmost leadership.

I like the new management better because they seem to have a much more coherent and focused vision, waste less resources, and while they obviously make mistakes too, overall, they have shown boldness in their actions. Even if I'm not particularly happy with the act of shutting down Google Reader, I like that they are bold and have the courage to execute what they think is right. Cutting a fairly successful product does not directly imply good leadership, but it does imply boldness which is highly correlated with good leadership.

My main point: in my view, the logical reasoning process that leads to the decision of inventing Google Reader inside Google or outside Google should be independent of Google culture at the time. It is a function of how much control you have over the company and your situation and goals, but not the company culture, so the correct decision with respect to the goals should not have changed over time. Logically, he should have always assumed that his product may get axed at the king's will and should have accounted for this risk in his calculations. The fact that leadership/culture can change against your will is a risk that existed from the start.

(To be honest, I don't have anything personal against this guy. I liked his product. What I meant to say was much more general when I mentioned "having balls": I really meant you cannot retrospectively claim credit for something you did not actually go and do, and the tone of that article irritates me in this respect. It might very well be the article writer's fault, not the guy himself.)

What % of Google employees do you think are also Reader users?

edit: I assume it is something like 90%. Which is why I'm pretty impressed that this change went through.

For search, they already scrape the entire web, including RSS feeds.

That's to say nothing of the administrative overhead.

I feel that a company like Google must have considered that option in their decision making process and felt there was a good reason to dismiss it.

- There's no such thing as a "Perf Room" as a special thing. calibration happens in regular meeting rooms.

- There quite possibly are some bad managers, but they are few and far between. There's plenty to gripe about at Google, but immediate managers are very rarely the topic.

- The transfer process is not broken, though it is not a revolving door either. You don't require high level sponsorship, though high level folk will be required to sign off on transfers for obvious reasons (what if 50 people all suddenly changed to teams in particular office?)

- 20% time is a great way to "audition" with a potential team you might like to transfer to, but I have never heard anyone but michaelochurch describe taking appropriate 20% time as "a gamble". There are naturally times when your manager might ask you to defer 20% work (occasional crunch time, or similar), but that's still a rarity.

1. I have training or specialized skills I acquired at the companies expense and I will be using them to compete against the company.

2. I have "insider knowledge" that they believe would amount to corporate espionage.

3. I know something that could cause harm to the company or its clients (ex. I used to do tech support for a series of store chains and I was not allowed to work for them upon leaving because my knowledge would make it trivially simple for me to steal from the store).

Those are just some of the thought processes. I don't think it's that you couldn't make money self employed, but you couldn't make it doing the same thing you were doing for your former employer (i.e. making a feed reader).

Saying "I had the idea for Reader but I would not tell Google because they would ruin it, and I would instead quit and form my own company" is exactly what these agreements are aimed at.

http://www.contractstandards.com/document-checklists/inventi...

I would have loved to see auto classification, user defined topics and content recommendation. That would have made a much smarter RSS tool.

[1] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html [2] http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/