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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

So my first response was who the $^!% is Tim Bray? Then I read. TLDR: famous enough to merit an article about his departure but not famous enough for Google to give an inch to retain him (see Hinton, Geoffrey for a counterexample).

No surprises here. Google is setting the stage for its own disruption. But that event is a total black swan much like paying $16B for a messaging company.

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Co-authoring the XML spec probably didn't make him a household word, but I knew who he was from that.

People choose "quality-of-life" over "job" all the time, especially when you remove the need to make money from the equation.

I think he made the right call. It's hard for me to imagine him having trouble finding work with 4 years of Google on his resume. That's the tech industry equivalent of being a made man IMO.

he was a very well-known and admired figure in the tech world long before he joined google. in fact his four years there are close to being the least impressive thing on his resume.

It does seem that he left on better terms that Brian Reid, but possibly for similar fundamental reasons...

Brian Reid was kicked out of Google by Urs Holzle ahead of the IPO after helping to build the company (so much for don't be evil and all that). I don't think the issue here is age discrimination - Geoffrey Hinton is in his late 60s - but rather that his skillset is not sufficiently critical to Google's flavor of the week to merit special treatment.

But as an ex-googler myself, they have become amazingly rigid and bureaucratic compared to who they were even 5 years ago. And end-user experiences of services like GMail and youtube are atrocious. I have a love/hate relationship with Android, but to stay in that relationship I had to ditch 2-year device contracts so I could keep up with whatever brand new shiny gets 6-12 months of tech support before being brickified.

Microsoft disrupted IBM. Google disrupted Microsoft. Who's going to ruin Google's day and relegate them to a 2nd tier player?

Hopefully it will be someone who values privacy. I look at the generally negative reaction to Google buying nest and can't help but think if it had happened a year or two earlier the reaction would have been completely opposite.

I am trying to trace some of the problems. For example, I believe Vic Gundotra should probably be fired.

> famous enough to merit an article about his departure but not famous enough for Google to give an inch to retain him

I do not work at Google, but I suspect there is a bit more involved in these decisions.

I have friends at Google at remote offices who are experiencing increasing pressure to move to Silicon Valley (which the cost of living rules out) as they consolidate distributed teams. Add in Google's disdain for telecommuting that I experienced myself during my stint there and their rope cutting here does not surprise me.

Sure, Google's culture favors the young. But their futurist agenda is being driven by Ray Kurzweil and Geoffrey Hinton, both old fogies by Silicon Valley standards.

I experienced the same disdain for telecommuting there. I accepted a contracting job on a specific pilot project, always hoping to eventually being able to work perhaps 1/2 time from my home in Arizona. That didn't work out and I left. Anyway, I very much appreciated the experience but I didn't want to live long term in Silicon Valley.

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