anonny

One thing I get a lot of is that working at Google is somehow a mark of complacency, and that as a smart young person I ought to be out founding companies. Chris Dixon has a post entitled "Every Time An Engineer Joins Google, A Startup Dies" in which he argues that Google and the like stifle innovation by ensnaring people in cushy, comfortable positions.

I definitely get that, and I do sometime think that the safety of working at a place like Google is addictive, but on the other hand, I'm basically a child in this market. I've almost never worked on anything for more than the two weeks it takes to complete a school project. If I were to go out and work at a startup and get saturated with the "disregard quality, acquire technical debt" mentality, I'd never become a respectable engineer.

I don't want to be mocked because I value technical experience over adventure.

> be a founder, which probably isn't within your financial resources right now unless you have the connections to get immediate funding

Could you elaborate on this a little? I realize this is a minor point of your comment, but it's not often that I hear about the financial requirements of being a founder. It's mostly "you're young and smart, you deserve to found a startup" and "follow your dreams," both of which seem fatuous to me.

What financial resources would you say are required to found a company? I'm currently in "save every penny" mode anticipating the moment when I strike out on my own, so I'm curious what people have to say on this topic.

P.S. Sorry to comment as a thowaway, but I forgot the password to this one and I'm engaging in another thread...

> The bottom line is, people have fallen out of love with Google because Google is no longer different.

By "people" do you mean the absolute height of the technological elite? The startup-founding, meetup-attending, venture capital funding-acquiring geniuses that apparently make the tech world go round? In that case, yes, Google is no longer the darling of the tech world, but rather just another large, profitable business with a solid bottom line and a horde of (presumably gullible) employees. To them, my working there is a sign that I'm too risk-averse and boring to ever be successful in their little patch of the knowledge economy.

But to the people who matter most, i.e. the people who interact with the mass of products Google puts out, the company is still quite positive. I find it difficult to believe that such intelligent people as the technorati are willing to lose faith in any company that does meaningful work that positively impacts massive amounts of people.

I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely trying to understand this. Is it the search for novelty? Is it the loss of connection to some ideal? Is it just part of a company growing up?

> I would be somewhere between indifferent and disappointed if one of my friends settled for a job at any of those companies.

I think this is emblematic of what I'm encountering: Joining Google is "settling." When I was in college, Google was at its peak, and I was very attracted to Google both because of the amazing work it did and the deep technical challenges it solved.

What I'm concerned with today is that, due to whatever cause, Google fatigue is needlessly costing me friends and respect. I don't think of myself as a Google employee, I see myself as an educated, capable engineer who happens to work for Google at the moment. I have actually received disrespect in social settings for this. Why do people take PR missteps and apply them to me as a professional?