I left Google, and lived to happily tell about it | Hacker News Reader

I left Google, and lived to happily tell about it

fastcompany.com

22 pointsjbae2916 comments

I am kind of tired of reading stories of people who have left Google to launch fantastical enterprise X. And this particular story has been covered here before, I think.

You're going to have to get used to it. These kind of self congratulatory "I left great job X to start my own company" stories have been staples of HN since forever.

Antidote:

I left a big company (not Google) to persue my own startup and fucked it right up leaving myself in debt for 5 years :)

Would love to hear that story...

There's not much to it. I started an online "virtual helpdesk" company. The first company I got in signed a contract and promptly went bust after I'd spend all the incoming cash on marketing to get other companies in. It plummeted into debt and I folded it.

The sickening bit was to offset the debt, I sold the codebase to another company which did quite well out of it. They offered to hire me in but I couldn't face it.

Would she have the same success if she didn't have Google on her resume? I frequently think about jumping ship, but sometimes I wonder if it won't turn out as well as these kind of stories suggest.

What is up with websites placing giant images above articles? The main content is the text, and while the image is nice, I want to be able to read, not look at the picture.

I don't know about this particular case but A-B tests often lead to this sort of thing (large images seem to really pull people in). We are moving into a world where software evolves into a niche. It doesn't need a reason why, and doesn't care if we understand it; it just works.

It doesn't need a reason why, and doesn't care if we understand it; it just works.

It also gets happily stuck and dies in a local optimum, being the simplicistic algorithm it is. We are moving (further) into a world where people stand for nothing, have no thoughts worth mentioning, and would do anything for money no matter how and where from; maybe we don't need to understand that, but it's pretty hard to unsee once you did.

This one seems pointless, but a lot of time it adds context. Like in a magazine, readers connect with an image and then the digest of the text comes easier.

Deleted comment

The article says this is what happens when she left Google. Not while she was there.

That's what I meant. Having Google on your resume opens up doors many doors when you leave - it would be hard NOT to find offers or connections once people know you're an ex-Googler. I don't imagine this to be the case if you leave a lesser known or respected company.

edit: oh, you were replying to a deleted comment

I'd like to ask why I get dumped to some shitty article I didn't ask for: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016456/this-note-taking-system-...

I get a "301 Moved Permanently".. wtf

So instead: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Whenever somebody says "why would you quit such an awesome job?", they have it backwards.

The better the job, the easier it is to quit and take a risk on something new, because (1) you tend to have more savings and (2) you are demonstrably capable of get another good job if you need to.

Does it bother anybody else that 'back' and 'up' are used as antonyms here?

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