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Google Faces Employee Retention Challenge
prakslash writes "60% of Google's 1900 employees now hold stock options worth at least one million dollars. According to experts in this Reuters article, it is now imperative for Google to maintain its sense of mission. If it fails to do so, a whole slew of employees facing post-IPO burnout and boredom will leave the company to go back to school, start a new company, or join the ranks of high-tech early retirees. Such a mass cashing-out could lead to a decline in Google stock price and intellectual brain-drain. Oh how I wish I worked for Google."
google is an american company, it's called a 'resume', not a 'CV', (OT, but just thought i would let you know).
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
a whole slew of employees facing post-IPO burnout and boredom will leave the company
Not to mention telling their boss to fuck off and die when he demands that you work late.
Well, when you claim to be good yet position your IPO to rape buyers of as much cash as possible while attempting to emulate every other web utility ala MS does software, fickleness tends to happen.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Such a mass cashing-out could lead to a decline in Google stock price and intellectual brain-drain
Google's main revenue stream is a cash-cow (google-ads/froogle(?)) so there's little danger that present employees leaving will significantly damage the stock price in the near future.
In the end though, after all the hype and rather trite-sounding platitudes about "thinking outside the box", google is just a search company. And there are others who are already doing that better
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Interesting. Is that for the same reason you wouldn't want to work where almost all of your coworkers have huge dicks and you don't, or did I get the wrong idea?
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Google's ignorance and incompetence manifests itself by its foolish penchant for posting math puzzles on freeway billboards. This time-waster foolishly presumes that throwing more math at the natural language search problem will somehow solve it. Naturally, the execs and workers at google are too ignorant and too incompetent to realize that throwing math at any real-world natural-language knowledgebase problem will never make a dent. The combinatorial explosion is too vast, and search tree branches too multifariously, and context proves too important when dealing with real knowledge in the real world.
Consider the following obvious example (obvious, but not to the incompetents working at google): you do a search for physical sicence. What does google (and every other search engine) return? A billion hits on physical fitness, and a trillion hits on miscellaneous science. Useless.
An acquaintance who works for the navy designing adaptive ablative hull armor for battleships did a google search for "penetration mechanics." Three guesses what that brought up.
Google has hit a brick wall in its search efforts. Hiring more math experts is useless, so google's already toast. Naturally, the google management is too ignorant and too incompetent to realize this, so they'll circle the bowl while the suction draws 'em down.
Meanwhile, like hard AI and all the other doomed abortive efforts to apply to math to human knowledge and natural language, google's search service will never improve significantly beyond its current dismal state. The basic AI problems of understanding knowledge in context, reading and grasping natural language in context, and extracting knowledge from assemblages of facts, have never been solved. As Marvin Minsky pointed out, "Whenever I see a number, it's so sad, because it means knowledge is being destroyed." Or words to that effect.
Naturally, the moderators will now mod this down to flamebait because the moderators are just as ignorant and just as cinompetent as the google math whizzes who waste their time spinning their wheels in the mud trying to apply math to the intractable problem of extracting meaningful knowledge from natural langauge. A lot easier to mod a post down than to provide a cogent thoughtful reponse, isn't it?
Vasectomies are relatively cheap. You don't need to have kids.
Damn it all, I wish people would stop bringing up children whenever someone talks about salary requirements! Like it's anyone else's fault they had a kid.
And only your country.
Let me guess, you're voting for Bush? I suggest you look out the window from time to time and notice there's a world BEYOND your states, that is rich in culture. And perhaps, you'll realise that using a bit of what you've learned doesn't make you unpatriotic.
Only a mostly USian audience could rate this tripe as cureently is (Insightful).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.