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"anyone who chooses to leave Google for anything else tends to get some kind of news (a tweet or two?) b/c Google is supposedly an amazing place to work."

I don't know if leaving google is news anymore. The average google employee only stays just over a year before moving on to something else.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-29/why-are-google-empl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/least-loyal-employe...

According to the article you link, the average tenure is one year for users of a site called PayScale. I've never even heard of it, so they have no idea how long I've worked at Google.

I think you read it wrong.

Its ..

>>The median employee tenure at Google is just more than one year, according to the payroll consultancy PayScale.

A number that is skewed by the fast rate of hiring by top-tier companies. When companies are hiring at the rate of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc then even an infinitesimal departure rate of old-timers would set the median at that level.

He's pointing out that the data comes from PayScale. Most Googlers have never even heard of PayScale, and so the information that is being reported in this article comes from a tiny slice of Google. It's also a biased sample, as someone who goes on PayScale is likely someone who is going to hunt around for the best salary available.

It's dangerous to assume everything you read is correct. You can usually get a hint at how it's biased by reading the article closely.

Your reading that wrong. Google has 54,000 people working for them and the meadean person working there right now has been with the company just over a year. However, compared to say IBM nobody has been with the company 20+ years and they only had 30,000 people in 2012 so the average is vary influenced by new highers and few long term people to balance it out. Worse there data is stale as people don't keep updating how long they have been with the company.

PS: The real number you want when comparing working conditions is turnover and even that get's influenced by rapid growth.

54K... I'm guessing that's including temps and contractors, which might also include the 1-year average duration.

2 years ago, that was 30k. So, if you assume that the growth is linear, that's 20% of the workforce that has been there less than a year.

Your speculation appears to be on the money as Brin and his wife are living apart... and another Googler is involved.

"Brin and Wojcicki, both 40 years old, had been married for six years and have two children. They are not yet legally separated.

The possibility of a reconciliation of the pair is unclear, since Brin has become romantically involved with a Google employee, according to sources. This is further complicated by the fact that that employee had also at one point been involved with another Googler."[1]

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20130828/google-co-founder-sergey-brin...

This is some nasty, tabloid-esque "reporting". It shows little respect for Brin or his wife, regardless of what the situation is. I wish we could not promote or spread this kind of rubbish, as it's not healthy at all.

In this situation, the reporter(s) at AllThingsD actually have much more detail (as they have clarified on Twitter) but haven't shared out of respect for the folks involved.

A British tabloid did a number on Eric Schmidt recently, calling him a "love rat" with "a string of exotic lovers".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2371719/Googles-Eric...

Is this kind of reporting any worse than the paid-for-fluff pieces in TechCrunch, PandoDaily and Wired?

This story is a rehash of a 6 year old story.

Ahem, I can think of noone more deserving of a hack job than the originator of this quote:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Bravo for the Daily Mail!

It's a Sergey Brin love Quadrangle according to an Aussie paper - with names and photos:

"an office romance that is being blamed for a split between co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, and the sudden resignation of another senior male executive who was the former boyfriend of Brin's new love interest."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/sergey-brin...

If you want to go tabloid, there's Gawker:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistres...

When your reaction is "bravo for the daily mail", that's your clue that you've missed something. The full quote is

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

He was trying to have that conversation years before Snowden's leaks, and look at the reward he got: people claiming he hates privacy even though he's giving you exact information on how google cannot be your confidant when the US government is involved, and to look elsewhere if you need that.

Not many CEOs are that frank, but look what happened. Gawker quoted only that single sentence out of that whole paragraph, and everyone (even the EFF[1]) quoted Gawker, so as far as someone reading those stories would know, that's all he said. With that kind of coverage (and "advocacy" groups like Consumer Watchdog egging it on), we should know exactly why more CEOs don't speak that frankly, and why all we get is corporate non-speak instead.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

I disagree, I was fully aware of the context, and your quote in italics.

Here are some more gems:

"We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about"

"Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever"

I think you are being too charitable to Schmidt and Google because in my view they are aiders and abetters in chief.

The quote stands on its own because what you have in italics does not in any way exonerate him. You're defending him, as in your view he's trying to drop hints, yet Google pestered people for phone numbers for years, and tracked them over the net, knowing full well what the information would be used for.

My point is he doesn't care for anyone's privacy but his own and that he is a hypocrite. I can dig up some articles on his view of consumer drones if you feel that my point of view needs more supporting evidence.

Further to the many edits I made above, I strongly disagree that the quote you have in italics is exact or frank.

It's awfully unfair on Brin's girlfriend too. Being involved with someone who is separated is very different from being involved with someone who is married and still living with their partner.

I found the salacious comments fairly off putting, perhaps AllThingsD thinks the rebirth of ValleyWag is a competitor?

In general product management does what you might think of "brand management" and "design language" so if Android needed roundier iconography I expect Barra was the guy to sign off on that, or if Samsung was getting too aggressive in making it a "Galaxy" phone instead of an "Android" phone he might get involved in that. I don't have inside knowledge, its just the kinds of things that role does in tech companies. That is why I wouldn't expect to see any sort of explicit impact statements wrt to Android. Rubin leaving on the other hand suggested that Android was going to become less the lede and more the flavor. Google has spent a lot of effort on making "Chrome" a more inclusive brand than Android which I find fascinating from a strategy perspective.

> In general product management does what you might think of "brand management" and "design language"

While it's possible some product managers have done that, they don't typically get involved in minutiae like that. Product Managers at Google are more business focused, figuring out what the teams should focus on and keeping them pointed in the right direction based on the market and feedback from their customers + users.