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[Zaraki_Kenpachi]

It's very much a real systemic problem. It's like how as a trader you can't keep a high rate of return up as your portfolio grows because eventually people just start copying what you do.

This is actually incorrect. It is a problem usually, not because people are copying you, but because you have too big of an impact on the market. The long shots or other choices you used to make were when you were too insignificant to affect the market. Now that you've grown larger it's harder to take those positions that netted you the high returns and success because they alter how the stock trades and the positions people take because now pumping $20MM dollars into a stock/security and pumping only $3MM into it causes a huge fluctuation on how it affects that security. It's pretty much why a lot of news firms say that large hedge funds have underperformed the market so badly in recent times compared to when they were deemed this illustrious thing that would make you millions. They said the solution is that they should start having target dates and either kill the fund or seal it off after X amount of dollars is added to the portfolio and create a new one instead.

 

[Slavik81]

There is a second issue in addition to ranking-based compensation: that is that launching short-lived experimental projects has given Google a bad reputation. People don't trust that their services will stay around and don't adopt them. Therefore there has been a push towards devoting resources to making core products very high quality rather than putting out a bunch of experimental stuff.

It certainly makes me reluctant to adopt either Go or Dart. Though, they could probably fix that problem without cutting the 20% time concept.

 

[smokeandmirrors]

This is so wrong it's unreal, keep trying 15 year old gaf.

If it's so wrong, feel free to prove us 15 year olds wrong.

 

[bobito]

If it's so wrong, feel free to prove us 15 year olds wrong.

Good financial management destroys companies?

I don't understand how any adult with a basic understanding of modern business could believe this.

 

[Femmeworth]

I'd first one to point out that Google is still better than most huge companies.

With that said, what this should teach us is that the Microsoft of the mid 90s onward is not just a fluke, or a consequence of Bill Gates' evil character. It is, in significant part, what happens when a company gets big in a free market system.

Once you have tens of thousands of employees, it becomes harder to track the performance of individual employees outside of straight forward stats and metrics. It becomes harder to continuously hire only the best of the best. It becomes harder to invent new products when you have to spend a great deal of effort defending the products you've already made from competition, and making sure your new products integrate intelligently with your old, more successful ones. And of course, it becomes harder because being a huge company typically means having shareholders and shareholders are typically short sighted.

This doesn't seem to be a trait unique to Microsoft, or to Apple, or to General Motors. It seems to be a systemic problem with companies growing larger.

You must not be talking about the United States.

How fitting, Google services are not working for me at the moment.

 

[Zeekaas]

My company has "do-your-thing-day" policy. But the problem is that the buisness unit managers can implement it their own way. Some buisness units have a day every two weeks where people can work on there own projects. They create really nice things. But mine has one every 2/3 months. So we never get to reallize some thing fruitfull. This is partially because we never have enough software engineers for the projects that directly generate money. So time is really important and scarce. Most of these personal projects only help benefit the process of building software in the longterm and do not contribute directly to getting new clients or generating money. But managers (at least mine) are very short sighted and when something doesn't directly benefit them its easily discarded.

The idea behindthese kind of things is nice, but when done bad it really gonna look like some stupid marketing thing (which in my case it kinda is).

 

[rpmurphy]

Sad to see, especially since the place I work at uses this policy (but less than 20%) and the developers who uses it have done some good stuff with it. Why aren't 20% time projects rewarded? If management sees it as an important aspect of their business for developers to spend time innovating, then it should at least be part of performance reviews.

 

[Stumpokapow]

startup: hire nothing but geniuses, pay them to be geniuses, throw out all the rules, get rich

stable company: the geniuses get older and suddenly want to work 9-5 because they have children and families so expecting them to sleep in the office during marathon 72-hour work campouts is less feasible. you need so many employees that now you're just hiring good candidates, not geniuses. stability becomes important, so you need testable metrics and steady growth. the people on top still want control so there needs to be a chain of reporting. suddenly you have a rule book. and yeah, accountants are real life-suckers.

see also; microsoft.

 

[tokkun]

startup: hire nothing but geniuses, pay them to be geniuses, throw out all the rules, get rich

stable company: the geniuses get older and suddenly want to work 9-5 because they have children and families so expecting them to sleep in the office during marathon 72-hour work campouts is less feasible. you need so many employees that now you're just hiring good candidates, not geniuses. stability becomes important, so you need testable metrics and steady growth. the people on top still want control so there needs to be a chain of reporting. suddenly you have a rule book. and yeah, accountants are real life-suckers.

see also; microsoft.

There are some counter-arguments in favor of larger software companies.

Better infrastructure, amortization of the cost of technologies that are used across the company, ability to negotiate more favorable contracts, and so forth.;

 

[gcubed]

startup: hire nothing but geniuses, pay them to be geniuses, throw out all the rules, get rich

stable company: the geniuses get older and suddenly want to work 9-5 because they have children and families so expecting them to sleep in the office during marathon 72-hour work campouts is less feasible. you need so many employees that now you're just hiring good candidates, not geniuses. stability becomes important, so you need testable metrics and steady growth. the people on top still want control so there needs to be a chain of reporting. suddenly you have a rule book. and yeah, accountants are real life-suckers.

see also; microsoft.

The problem with Google is they want you to work like a start up without most of the rewards.

 

[hirokazu]

The new maps is sick, the Moto X is an amazing phone getting amazing reviews, Google+ is growing and my go-to social website, and aside from hiccups youtube works just fine. Where are you coming up with this nonsense?

I can't say about Moto X, it looks alright, but my own personal experience is this:

Maps on browser at least looked really cool when revealed its astounding how they went backwards on so many things. It's so much more unintuitive to do a lot of the stuff that old Maps could do. Print a Map? Nope. Easily get directions with multiple waypoints? Nope. When I want to click on a POI, zoom in, or set a pin it'd want to do something else half the time. That's not to say there aren't improvements but its become frustrating to use despite them.

Google+ seems alright and it's cool that everyone you know uses it, but here nobody uses it period. I checked it out recently and it's changed quite a bit since it was first unveiled, but the settings and things feel just as clusterfucked to find what you want as Facebook. Add to that basically every Google service eventually getting shoehorned to integrate into Google+ when nobody cares or uses Google+ and ditching features people actually used in order to do so.

YouTube. Well it's still OK apart from it refusing to play in a browser without Flash if it wants to serve up ads. And good lord, so. many. fucking. ads. They really ought to realise if you refuse to serve a video in a perfectly functioning browser, the viewer will just close the window. No video for the user, no ad served for Google, bad experience for the user. Google isn't going to get that ad view anyway so just give users the fucking video! You can serve them banner ads instead! Because of this I Adblock YouTube even on browsers with Flash. Google can fuck off and serve the ads to the next person.

 

[beato_angelico]

Maps on browser at least looked really cool when revealed its astounding how they went backwards on so many things. It's so much more unintuitive to do a lot of the stuff that old Maps could do. Print a Map? Nope. Easily get directions with multiple waypoints? Nope. When I want to click on a POI, zoom in, or set a pin it'd want to do something else half the time. That's not to say there aren't improvements but its become frustrating to use despite them.

I tried the new maps and I came back to the old one after a bit; frustrating is the right word, because there are improvements after all.

 

[FStop7]

I've heard that the Doubleclick merger killed the popular myth of Google's workplace, or at least put it on the road to its end.

That said, they've poached away some brilliant minds from their competitors. A bunch of geniuses from Microsoft now call Google X their home.

 

[MarzipaNMOS]

Essentially, this.

Google hasn't become MSFT quite yet, but Facebook is the new Google for engineers.

No I'd say Palantir is the new place where the hotshot CS majors want to work. From the numerous people I've talked to working at Google and FB, Facebook is a bit more relaxed w.r.t. management but it also suffers from poor code quality. Everyone I know working at Palantir loves it and prefers it over FB and google both for the type of work and the company culture. Also, it's still private so when it IPOs they'll get a nice payday

 

[ElectricBlue187]

I tried the new maps and I came back to the old one after a bit; frustrating is the right word, because there are improvements after all.

The only improvement I really like is the new map symbology. Everything else is slow and clunky and awful.

 

[zou]

not sure how adsense can be an example, considering it wasn't built in-house but acquired by purchasing the company that developed the underlying product/technology.

 

[tokkun]

No I'd say Palantir is the new place where the hotshot CS majors want to work. From the numerous people I've talked to working at Google and FB, Facebook is a bit more relaxed w.r.t. management but it also suffers from poor code quality. Everyone I know working at Palantir loves it and prefers it over FB and google both for the type of work and the company culture. Also, it's still private so when it IPOs they'll get a nice payday

I think a lot of the Silicon Valley libertarian crowd consider Palantir to be disgusting.

 

[yellow submarine]

No I'd say Palantir is the new place where the hotshot CS majors want to work. From the numerous people I've talked to working at Google and FB, Facebook is a bit more relaxed w.r.t. management but it also suffers from poor code quality. Everyone I know working at Palantir loves it and prefers it over FB and google both for the type of work and the company culture. Also, it's still private so when it IPOs they'll get a nice payday

IPO or bust baby! No one stops this train etc.

 

[BananaBomb]

I think a lot of the Silicon Valley libertarian crowd consider Palantir to be disgusting.

this is truthfact. palantir gets you the evil eye around here.

edit: and to answer the question of where all the "smartest" people are going nowadays in SV, it's not facebook and it's not google and it's not palantir. the objectively far and away smartest people I know are all at companies you haven't heard of yet, usually with executives that are largely professors from Stanford/Berkeley.

 

[Junior Mint]

I think a lot of the Silicon Valley libertarian crowd consider Palantir to be disgusting.

this is truthfact. palantir gets you the evil eye around here

More info for us that aren't in the valley?

 

[BananaBomb]

More info for us that aren't in the valley?

i have a friend who works there and every time it's brought up behind his back someone is always talking smack. i've even seen more extreme people on the internets (in light of the recent NSA thing) suggest that anyone who has worked for palantir be blacklisted from working at your company (if you are in the position to implement such a policy).

 

[MarzipaNMOS]

RE: Palantir - What you guys are saying is true for the older people and managers; my perspective is from recent graduates & interns.

Also while it's true that the top talent goes towards startups and research spinoffs that same talent usually doesn't do so straight out of school unless they were involved with proff/founders beforehand, which is more what I was referring to. The companies that land fresh talent early on in their careers benefit the most though, obviously.

 

[tokkun]

More info for us that aren't in the valley?

They provide software to the government intelligence agencies and contractors that has been linked to attacks on Wikileaks. It is believed that they helped to build the NSA software the government uses to spy on its citizens.

 

[Enron]

This is so wrong it's unreal, keep trying 15 year old gaf.

Yeah, seriously.

Good financial management destroys companies?

I don't understand how any adult with a basic understanding of modern business could believe this.

Most adults don't have a basic understanding of modern business.