Google's Turn To Be The Villain

caesar79 writes "The New York Times has an article titled "Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain" (also evil but at least free registration required) According to the article, the "go-getting" attitude of Google is coming across as arrogance to many people in the Valley. More importantly, it draws attention to the fact that Google has drained the market of talent, caused a 25% to 50% hike in salaries and made it difficult for startups to get funding."

Comments

Not even close

[blamanj]

Google is nowhere near to being a monopoly. If you look at recent results from MediaMetrix, you'll see that Google commands a little over 1/3 of the "market" for search.

Google 36.5%
Yahoo 30.5%
MNS 15.5%
AOL 9.9%
Ask/Exite 6.1%

Leaked insider trading data

[SuperKendall]

That sure sounded bad. But if you'll look back you'll see he leaked some financial stuff he should not have pre-IPO.

Once I read that I realized the article had an agenda. Or the reporter just really sucks at fact checking.

Living off the air

[rumblin'rabbit]

Start a FOSS project, build up a reputation, build up a community...

And how, pray tell, are your suppossed to eat as your're building up your precious reputation?

That's what venture capital does. It puts food on your table as you develop your product. It seems like an awfully successful system for something that's supposedly a sham.

The alternative is to fund everything out of pocket. If you have no financial resources, well then you're just another talented designer working at McDonalds.

Re:Industry whiners go "WAHHHHHH....."

[Anthony Boyd]

and the B.S. about it hurting startups is insane. No startups worth a damn started by hiring expensive people...

Tim, I'm going to use your post as a starting point for my post, but please don't consider this a rebuttal to your post.

Google isn't quite in my neighborhood, but close by. I know people working there, and I currently do contract work for a start-up populated by ex-Google and ex-Borland employees. As you might guess, the truth is more boring and less extreme than people are making it sound.

Google is cornering the market in a very limited sense -- they hire PhD's who can survive multiple rounds of interviews and tests. In other words, they're hiring exceptionally smart, high-end scholars who can survive a brutal vetting process. As you might guess, there are NOT a lot people like this. For Google to grow, it has to suck that niche dry.

This does affect start-ups. How? Well, most start-ups employ a few of these geniuses to help give them an edge and establish some technical leadership. When each company had a handful of PhD-level employees, everything was spread out evenly. Now that Google has pulled hundreds of them in, it is NOT spread out. A start-up looking to appear experienced, or to have some token high-end leadership figures, is hard-pressed. And that impacts the VC dollars coming in. That's a real problem.

Having said that, I'm contracting for a start-up that shares a building with the Mozilla team. Guess what? The start-up is fine. There are plenty. They may not all have evil geniuses as figureheads right now, but they're plugging along.

Even more than that, Google has left the MA/BA/MS/BS-level employees alone. Or at least, it hasn't made a dent. If you have a Batchelor's degree in Silicon Valley and you want a job, you're going to have to pursue it just as hard as in the rest of the country. The economy is slowly turning around, but it really is slow. Companies are not fighting over average joes, as they did during the Internet boom. It's still a bust, people still fight for jobs, and salaries are NOT sky-high.

So yes, Google is having an impact. But no, it is not affecting most engineers. Yes, other business leaders are complaining. No, their sentiment isn't shared by the rest of the local community.