xxcode

He can easily get a job that pays 10M a year

Peanuts

Nadella was a Program Manager at Microsoft.

This is the best comment here. Would love to understand more about the 'hollowness'. FWIW, they have a nice new building there now (Maki).

It's investor money

Unfortunately, I always thought Neri's work was BS. Perhaps I am not imaginative enough. But thats what I think. Its BS. Nothing works. Maybe its interesting design, but it didn't appeal to me.

I think you can still do a 20% project. This was about the performance systems, and not about workload. Workload is easy peasy. Its almost a sinecure for most people because all you need to do is to optimize for promo.

Thank you. This is a good point. I deleted a submission that had my email address. Perhaps they will black ball me but I dont think I said anything that was libel or false. I just shared my opinions.

Agreed and I did. I quit Google this Friday.

Why don’t you work for google for a bit and experience it first hand. You can probably go back to your present job later if you want. As senior engineer at google, it is definitely 75%+ politics and project management and 25% technical competence. Depends on a group but perhaps if you are on a mission driven group like Brain etc, it can be better. I don’t know.

I would recommend joining a smaller group at google, and also one which has engineers who haven’t all been around at google for 5+ years.

Overall, it can be fun at times but relatively unfulfilling. Google pays above market though. I think if it paid market, almost 50% of tech staff would leave.

Product managers at google are also very political and if they are not, they get pushed out etc. I had one PM who always passionately argued about the user etc, and was eventually pushed out because he was not internally ‘aligned’. The product he was arguing against got cancelled this Friday after 2 years of work

If you transfer, you don’t get promoted

I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein.

Please consider not working here, if you have other options (which you almost always do)

Whats wrong with a Google search?

interesting titbit:

aaron's dad (Bob Swartz) worked as a patent attorney at the media lab. Not sure if he still does, but he did.

some external reference: https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/aaronsw-2013-03-12/

Not sure which Feynman biography you are alluding to, but if you're talking of his anecdotes - "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", I don't think those are really honest bio. They dont talk about the incredibly hard work that Feynman did in order to become a genius. He worked incredibly hard, for incredibly long. His anecdotes cultivated a profile of a joker and a genius. He was probably both, but he got to the genius part by working extremely hard.

Databricks is one the companies that raised money from In-Q-Tel. Given that there are likely to be multiple Turing award winners from that company, I'd say its money well spent.

I would go to Marvin's lectures - they were in the evening, like 7PM or so. This was early 2000's, and I was a grad student at MIT.

I went to Patrick Winston, and asked him if it was worth going to Marvin's lectures given that I keep falling asleep. He said - of course, we all know you are overworked, but marvin may say something that will change your life.

Thank you.

Skills:

C++ Development (with some C++ 11 experience) Windows Development (Visual C++) Javascript (some experience building reactive pages) learning Android. Speech User Interface Expertise

For me going to school and majoring in CS was a exceptionally enjoyable experience. I did not think about jobs. I didn't even think of being a programmer. I took a liberal arts view to computer science - it taught me how to think about complex problems. And school was so much fun, both MIT and UC Berkeley. I remember feeling that I was getting smarter every day.

btw, huge congratulations to the team there. Really awesome people.

Why would they choose no-name investors? Maybe these investors are the new A16Z

Keep leaning in.

yes - this is the kind of BS that I alluded to because he is working with Neri Oxman.

Neri is an architect who says her work is 'biologically inspired'. BS Central.

The problem here is that he is joining Neri's group. Neri is an architect who tries to design articles inspired by biology. It's all wishy washy with her (at-least from the science perspective).

So all that enthusiasm is going to Zilch, unless he wants to be a brain skeumorphia artist.

Again, this might inspire some awesome things, but maybe not traditional science research. I think most of HN can buy that.

Sorry if this is politically incorrect. I say this respectfully and with the hope that it would be useful to someone who reads it:

People typically save money for their kids. The 'mothering' or 'fathering' instincts are so strong that we protect resources for our progenys. It appears that Tim Cook may never have a real progency. So what will he do with all this money? He could give it to his nephew. Maybe. He gets a thank you card from them. But his 'parenting' instincts are not triggered by it. So he has to do something else with it, like donating it to Charity.

1. Dropbox: NPV is less than 10B. Will probably get brought for 3-4B by bigco if bigco can transcend internal politics. Not sure who will buy them - most probably Microsoft under Ndella.

2. Palantir: I have some experience with working with Palantir FDEs who were marketed to BigCo as 'gift from god to solve all problems'. They were pretty useless.

I think Palantir is basically shit. Wait and watch.

I just looked at the Box stock. Google Finance says institutional ownership of 0%. Never seen something like this before - perhaps gFinance has buggy data or else the smart money is not on Box. Perhaps similar story on Dropbox. Not sure when their IPO is, but I hear the rumblings of it.

We use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty good. Strongly recommended.

The average engineer who joined square about 3 years ago has made more than 2M