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Xooglers - Google Discussed by Ex-Googlers
perler writes to tell us that Xooglers, a relatively new website created so that ex-Google employees could reminisce and share, has been gaining a great deal of popularity recently. The website shares what went wrong, what went right, and all of the funny happenings in between. Quite an interesting piece of Google history.
I assume that being a Google employee represents the highpoint of your career and you would never want to leave...like one of the xooglers says, why become a boring specialized cell when you can be a stem-cell and take on any and every challenge thrown at you?
If *I* get a Google job, I am never leaving!
"How long does it take the sauna to get hot? You think it's okay to go in the women's locker room to get some towels since we're out in here?"
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
post only mentions the good things, in fact he seems wistfull of his time there, although he does allude to bad things in a previous post. wonder if the tone of this website will change in a few years time
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/google_fires_blogger _and_the_evils_of_gossip_and_innuendo.html
I'm not suprised there's now a Blog completely dedicated to ex-Google employees. It seems that they (Big G) don't take kindly to outsiders looking in... And God help you if you try to open the window and give others a peek.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
So how is this news? this is just publicity for a blog. It's not because there is the word google in the story that you have to post it. You can mod me down if you want but this is true... maybe if the blog was something new ok but it's old... it's been around for a while...
to the "Let's get a real database" comment. It's nice to see such a good comment over MySQL by pros. Back in 2001/2, when I was considering to start a DB project for my own amusement, I heard almost nothing but bad things over MySQL by PostSQLers or Oraclers due to missing features though I went with it anyway.
BTW, it's not a slam on those others systems, but I feel the missing feautures debate usually gets out of proportion to actual use of said feautures by the average project by a small/mid-size business.
How did these people become ex-employees? Were they fired or did they leave on their own accord?
I've been browsing some of their early entires (and the one guy's profile that's not empty) but that detail of their google experience is never addressed. I would think that if you wanted attention for being an ex-anything, you'd at least be upfront about what brought about that "ex-" status.
So I'll reserve my trust regarding this site... for the same reason that I can't imagine a blog site of my ex-wives to be perfectly honest about me.
Ok, I was worried about one thing, and I was right. The leaders of Google are consumed with a vision, and ulitmatley, that's a very dangerous thing. While wanting it is ok...consuming an entire population around it...I don't know. At this point, I'm not so comfy-cozy about Google any longer. That's not to say I'm comfortable with Apple, M$, or the folks any other large company. I am worried in the end. Worried that age will take hold of these people at Google, and wring them out to dry. I surely hope that in the end they appreciate people. I mean that - appreciate them. Not use them, and cater to them b/c they are laborers. Drawing in brilliant people only to use them...seems caustically dangerous. From this blog, it seems like they did that at least somewhat to the author.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
No ScuttleMonkey- it's what a bunch (more specifically: TWO. "Doug" and Ron") of ex-employees think went wrong, think went right. I've seen ex-employee websites/mailing lists and been on them. They're petty, rarely accurate (I saw wild claims made I knew were false) and so on.
I am no fan of Google, but why is anyone giving ANY credence to what two guys have to say? I see nothing to verify they are who they say they are.
Please help metamoderate.
I browsed through the whole damn blog trying to figure out why each of the two guys that write the blog quit. One said "I guess the #1 FAQ for people who have left Google is why did you leave. My main reason for leaving was that I was commuting from Los Angeles. I'd fly up on Southwest early Monday morning, fly back on Thursday evening, and telecommute on Fridays and weekends. That regimen was pretty stressful even under the best of circumstances, but when 9/11 happened it became completely untenable. I had already given my notice before 9/11, but I don't think I could have stayed on after that even if I had wanted to. But I'm getting ahead of myself." From what I could tell, the other one, "Doug", made a decent chunk of change in stock options and doesn't have to work anymore. Probably the same is true for the first guy also.
I understand Google is a seemingly great company to work for and a pioneer in the search engine world. But why did I even waste the time to read though that "Back in ought one when I was still at Google.." garbage? I think I was hoping for some juicy tidbit that only blog readers would be privvy to, something secretive that I would never expect to happen to the employees of Google. Instead, I got a nice voyage down memory lane - getting to listen to people reminisce about things I was never there for in the first place.
I don't know if this qualifys as either "News for Nerds." or "Stuff that Matters."
hi mom!
Well LAAA-DEEE-DAAAAA. Excuse the rest of us who couldn't get past the 3rd round of interviews! We'll just continue in our windowless labs/cubicles here, sucking down on 35 cent coffee from a vending machine perpetually on the fritz.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
It seems to be teeming with irony.
You'll see there's a lisper who left JPL because managers decided to follow "best practices" of industry and move to C++. This is despite the fact that programming a space mission isn't a "standard" problem -- it is, in fact, a problem that a language like LISP is excellently suited, because people can deal with unclear/dynamic requirements as a project evolves.
So he goes to Google because they have some LISP guys there (not using LISP -- just smart guys) -- and then he gets told to do the first Java project. And later he gets told that LISP is out of the question.
And in fact, he details how a race condition in the C++ memory management leads to them billing clients nonsense amounts -- a problem that simply couldn't happen if they'd used a language like LISP (or Java) -- because the GC wouldn't reclaim something if the thing was still in use.
So Google can yet be beat -- they are not perfect. Of course, that doesn't mean there is anyone to beat them, yet.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
'Do no evil' does not jive with 'IPO'. Once a company goes public it's doomed to image control in order to keep it's stock price looking pretty.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
From the blog: '..when I left Google in October of 2001..'
What reason other than to ride on the crest of Google's success can there be to wait until now to write this? Sure, some of the things are interesting, but something a bit more current would be more newsworthy - this is 'News for Nerds' maybe in 2002, but history now.
"Ron" is Ron Garrett, nee Erann Gat. He used to work at JPL, where he created an autonomous spacecraft control system which was named NASA Software of the Year. His homepage has a list of his publications, and you can find his Usenet postings with Google Groups, if you like (he used to post quite frequently in comp.lang.lisp).
His Blogger profile even links to his homepage. Xooglers is not some anonymous blog; it's written by people using their real names and at least one of them has a decent track record as a software developer. I haven't even seen any particularly negative remarks in Xooglers posts, except for self-deprecating remarks by the authors! Why don't you actually try reading TFB instead of spewing bile?
Doug Edwards, Google's Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management from 1999-2005, has started blogging as Xoogler
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you can find more information about here-
http://www.addict3d.org/index.php?page=viewarticl
Does anyone else find it ironic that this blog is hosted on Google owned Blogger.com?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
Slashdot readers who are Sick And Tired of pointless Google stories.
Tech startup stock option millionaire dropouts engineers are a rarity these days. One of their tendencies is to cement their genius reputation by publishing a personal account of their heroics and lamenting the sad decline of the company - after cashing out ofcourse. Good examples are Mark Andreesen, Jamie Zewinski, and Andy Hertzfeld? Any others?
an ill wind that blows no good
Early adopters of Google may have, for the most part being looking for a better search engine, but what sold Google to the masses was far simpler.
The masses seek simplicity.
(1)Google, the name is as simple as baby talk. The name, Google, while carrying its math connotations, is friendly in a silly, simple way. MicroSoft, like a cowboy wanting to see his brand everwhere, would do well to let go of MSN and brand its search engine with something akin to Google. Yahoo has some similarity in simple, attractive terms, but Google is bunny cute.
(2)The colours Google employs are engaging in a primitive simple way as is the name Google. If I were competing against Google I would go with simple attracting colours that held out a similarity to finger painting. Again, Google employs simple, childlike colours that are reminescent of kindergarden and hold out a process of searching that is as simple and fun as fingerpainting. Google's cartoon representations of Christmas, Easter and other notable days again are made to make the Google search experience childlike in simplicity. It's Google's eye candy that pulls in the common searcher.
If I went up against Google I'd start out by licensing something like Paddington Bear to signify a safe site for children. Paddinton's raingear suggests safety and what's more child safe than a teddy bear? I'd employ other brightly coloured images, say a red rose for personals, etc..
Icon's dominate windows on the desktop, the same iconographic point and click simplicity would do more to drive inroads into Google's domain than better tech.
Unfortunately Google's competitors, like Google itself is driven by wringing every penny from every resource to support stock price. Public companies can only do evil, like the wicked witch in Snow White, they stand before the mirror and ask "mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose stock price is the prettiest of them all", and, what they offer to their users is a bright, rosy, red poisoned apple to put them to sleep.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
A lot of you are pointing out that these are just random ex-Google people (or even that we have no proof they ever worked there) but there are some good points brought out in the articles. I think the majority of posters who are complaining about the blog or the accuracy of a blog are just randomly posting in hopes of points/Google-whoring rather than actually reading what was linked to. That being said,...
While those outside Google might disagree with the ultimate decisions the company has made, they should know that those decisions were not made without reflection on the consequences. One of my goals with Xooglers is to expose the nature of that debate. I agree with Matt that providing more transparency into how difficult decisions get made within the Googleplex can only enhance the brand. It's not enough to say you're not evil; you need to show the world how you define evil and how you choose to avoid it.
Well put don't you think? Indeed a large portion of slashdotters tend to believe Google is the messiah and that they are not an 'evil' company. But let's face it, 'evil' is different from person to person and to vaguely portray one company as evil and another as not is ridiculous. To many, MS won't seem evil - after all, a lot of people use their products and are damn satisfied with them. To still others, the fact that Google supports OSS means nothing and they want only excellence of product (BTW don't start a tangential reply about MS products not being excellent blah blah).
The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been. As an aside, there is a raging debate in the hacker community about the overall economic merit of the open source model. (Making money producing free software is quite a challenge.) I am not taking sides in that debate here. All I am saying is that from the end user's point of view free software is often much better than the producers of commercial software would like people to think.
Again, a good point - there are some OSS that are good, others that aren't. But what I want to point out is that Google did go for non-OSS software at one point - suddenly, it seems like Google was making a decision from the standpoint of "What would be best for us?" (the fact that the ACTUAL decision they made was wrong and they returned to OSS later is irrelevant BTW) correct? Indeed, they are a business. While no one here can likely say for certain, we certainly shouldn't assume that because of Summer of Code or other opened material that Google is supporting OSS (btw I am not an advocate of OSS nor am I an opponent, so please don't think I am being biased) or that it is "not evil".
My 2 cents
PS: When people bring up databases and talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, they often ignore some other big players: MS's SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Don't start a thread about the different relational databases half-assedly plz.
Comment by the pros? Ron isn't a database guru by any stretch, and in the comments he even ignorantly states that mysql not having transactions (it didn't at that time) didn't matter because you can easily "roll you own".
This isn't a small business using mysql because they don't need features, this is google, and they needed features that mysql didn't have. They used stupid and unsafe hacks to partly work around it instead of simply using a real database.
Of course it was a pain to move to a real DB after the fact, that's why you shouldn't do things wrong in the first place.
If they'd gone private instead of going public, they could have been a very profitable near-monopoly, sustained by the fact that it doesn't really cost that much to run a search engine, and thus, their ad content can be minimal. But now they have to produce a reasonable return on investment for their overblown market cap. So they have to add more and more advertising-oriented services, from catalogs to classifieds. This dooms them to become more like their competitors in those spaces.
It's not going to be fun to work there as the profitabilty vise closes.
Excuse me? I've lost count of the number of NDA's I've signed over the years but one thing that I do know is that violations of the law are not subject to NDA and revealing such information to the authorities is covered by the whistleblower statutes. The public good has nothing to do with your comment. Your duties under the law do.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
What kind of slashdotter are you?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Google is doing a fine job sucking up talent. Not just the big fish like Cerf, but the more clued individuals in our industry. Working at Google has become something of a status symbol, something akin to having a CCIE. Oh, you worked at Google? You must be good. I've noticed one thing that results from this. There seem to be more senior positions open in the Bay Area, New York, everywhere Google has significant footprint. Too, the annual salaries for these positions has risen about 20%, presumedly out of demand.
For that, I can say ... thank you Google!