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Who is Winning the Web Talent War
jg21 writes "Ever since Fortune wrote an article about it, mentions have been occurring hither and yon about how Google is having problems retaining employees, and the latest comes in Web 2.0 Journal, where Dare Obasanjo interestingly tracks and interprets a couple of blog entries that he says leads him to hypothesize that "Google's big problem is that the company hasn't realized that it isn't a startup anymore." Of course Obasanjo works for Microsoft; it will be interesting to see if an equally prominent Googler posts a counter-theory."
From reading google and microsoft reviews at glassdoor.com, it became apparent that microsoft is like a government job with tons of bureaucracy. However google on the other hand treats non-engineers (marketing, etc) like second class citizens. Marketing and Sales guys complained that the expected endless promotions but instead found a kind of invisible ceiling.
Based on people I know who have done it, and other stuff I've seen online it seems everyone goes from Microsoft to Amazon because they want excitement, then Amazon to Google because they realize Amazon isn't that exciting, and then Google back to Microsoft because they realize they want to work 40 hour weeks and be comfortable.
Why doesn't he focus his energy on the company HE works for ? ... I think I'll spend tomorrow seeing if I can't fix our competitions problems for them.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
The easiest way to win at something is just to declare yourself the winner as soon as you possibly can, because it's apparently much harder to reverse a decision once any kind of decision has been made on the winner (i.e. the 2000 US presidential election, where Bush just "declared" himself the victor and became president, despite actually losing the vote).
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I think when companies get this large it's all about "cycles of popularity." All places have their pluses and minuses, and the few reports in this article are hardly of such grandiose statements. I can say having interacted with a lot of Microsoft people lately they really do have a thing against google. The mantra really is "Google doesn't really do anything successfully other than search." I think someone said on Slashdot that Microsoft makes software people have to use, Google makes products people want to use.
Truly talented people should eventually feel the onus of working for someone else's company and branch off to do their own things. Inevitably a God-gifted talent is going to have some crazy and genius ideas that do NOT fit the corporate mold and whose superiors will be uncomfortable with such ideas and whose potential they will not be able to see. And such people will get out.
For instance, ignoring the dubious notion of 'morality', how many projects have the top Google guys stifled because they were 'evil' or didn't see their potential? Sometimes you just want to make evil.
Thus, I'd argue that perhaps it's not truly a mass-exodus from Google TO Microsoft or Amazon, but just seems that way because of the constant influx of new hires to feed the beasts. Many of the top talents go to start-ups or back to school, or in some cases out of the comp. sci. world entirely.
Anyone who saw even his earliest writing (ie. in Kuro5hin when he was just interning) is aware that he views everything through the highly tinted lens of internal Microsoft propaganda.
In any case Google are still best positioned to control the web for the forseeable future and Microsoft is thus being bonzaied into competing in the operating system arena and having their lunch eaten by Apple on the desktop front and GNU/Linux on the server front.
At least Mono means that all the time that Dare has invested in .Net won't be completely wasted :)
I'm reminded of a thread on this site a few weeks ago where contributors almost uniformly insulted female programmers. Any company that learns to reward ability, not gender, is going to get ahead.
Some of us find that bickering terribly interesting though. I'm one of those people.
I doubt many of those people work for Google.
This sounds more like a snitcher's frustration report than an actual work report.
Googles problem that is Way Left. Microsoft is on the Right (It use to be left but it moved right), A lot of talent is in the middle those small to mid sized companies, who may never get wide brand reconigtion. But make a good living giving their custers tools they want. Slashdot tends to think of software/service in terms of mostly Consumer level products, stuff that you use on your own system. However there is a huge market of buisness only apps many of them customly made, by a lot of talanted programers who's code will not be recgonized outside their clients. Many of them offer novel and inovative methods to get things done as the reason why they were hired because they couln't find software that did what they wanted done. As well they need to keep their product quality (some will call it eyecandy) up to what people expect and see from companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Both Microsoft and Google have a huge Ego, Microsoft has been brused lately a bit but not as much as it deserves. And these huge ego's often close their eyes on what is going on.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hypothesis is wrong. Google is very aware that it's not a start-up. The people at Google are aware that it's not a start-up.
I'd say the one thing Google realizes is that software development is still a craft. As such, there is a lot of artistic nature in the production of good software.
Most other software companies have screwed up on this point, by mistaking software development for engineering just because the tools and product are "high tech". They are missing the *act* of software development; distracted by all the high tech trappings.
Once a company makes that mistake, it's over. Because bad engineering processes are impossible to pry out. They're like a cancer.
Google is not a start-up in *size*. Hasn't been since before they went public.
And no matter what start-up feel Google manages to maintain, that's the one that will never come back.
They know that.
A startup has one or two primary products, and everything else the company does is about promoting these.
A mature company the size of Microsoft is either a middleman like Walmart, or it has diversified, and has multiple product lines, and gets worried if any one product line is a significant part of its revenue. A mature company is willing to allow competition between business units. A mature company that puts all its wood behind one arrow and cripples products to avoid competing with their sacred cow(s) ends up like DEC... bought by a company that got started making the personal computers DEC didn't want to undercut the VAX.
Microsoft crippled their handhelds and cut off the micro-notebooks built around Windows CE, and now they're scrambling to come up with a version of Windows that will compete in that market. So instead of having ten or fifteen years of increasingly sophisticated handhelds running efficient but still desktop-quality software that make Linux on the eeePC look sick, they cut that whole line of development off when they introduced Pocket PC for palmtops only and promoted Tablet PC for the notebook-level devices instead.
I agree with your excremental assessment of Microsoft's web presence. But the rivalry between Google and Microsoft is about a lot more than web applications.
And far from being FUD, a lot of the criticisms of Google and its products are spot on. I'm no MS fanboy, and indeed if there's a Microsoft way to do something and a Google way, the Google way is always the one I prefer.
But the fact remains that too much of Google's software is poorly tested, haphazardly documented, and always introducing irritating feature changes without notice. That's not a sign of a company that's well-run.
There, I disagree. An application like Microsoft Word shouldn't break just because you're using an ethernet adapter that Microsoft didn't test. There are more QA issues with the kind of software Microsoft develops than there are with Google's. But Microsoft can afford to spend a lot of money on QA, and does.
Google's testing issues are simpler, but not for the reasons you state. I very much doubt that anybody does an IE/Firefox/Opera runthrough every time an application gets a new feature. Browser-specific issues are handled by the AJAX layer, and Google's is pretty solid. In effect, that's a single platform that all their applications are coded against.
That does lower the QA bar significantly, but it's obvious that Google's QA effort doesn't even reach that lowered bar. Not because they can't afford it or because they don't care about quality. It's because their corporate culture has no room for the people who see that boring stuff like QA gets done.
But, I can see how you might still think that a bad thing if you worked for Lotus or Borland. But then, those guys NEVER let the marketing dweebs near their product groups, right?
It showed.