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Google's First Employee Departs
redletterdave writes "Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, will leave the search giant for Khan Academy, an online education portal based in Mountain View, Calif. Silverstein had been with Google shortly after it first launched in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, a friend of both Page and Brin, in September 1998. He had helped Brin and Page develop infrastructure when Google was just a Stanford grad school project, but when he officially joined the company, Silverstein became its technology director. The Khan Academy, where Silverstein is heading next, is a not-for-profit organization that aspires to change the education industry by providing free 'world-class education to anyone anywhere.' Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an enormous fan of the service, telling CNN that he uses it with his kids."
Obligatory.
Craig is good egg who walks the walk. Not hungry for power, glory or money, he already has enough of all that. The original Google do-gooder. I sincerely hope that his shoes do not prove too big to fill.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I'm guessing he has enough money to last him several lifetimes by now. Good to see people that will work for non-profit at that point.
Where do you jump to when you already work for one of the biggest companies on the planet and are richer than Midas?
It took him 14 years to find a job he wanted more than the one he had. If only we were all so lucky.
The code for Khan Academy uses Google Code and runs on Google App Engine so he should at least have a passing familiarly with the technology stack that his new company uses :-)
Source: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/109/
Khan Academy doesn't stop at K-12. There's plenty of college level material there.
I'm sure he'll get back to you as soon as he has eradicated AIDS and cured cancer.
Sincerely,
Mr GetYourPrioritiesInOrder Esq.
No one is stopping people from making a personal choice about the software they use. No one is forcing people to use MS Office.
All the cool kids used Alta Vista.
You weren't one of them. We used Asta la Vista
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
And your alternative is what?
Don't just complain and whine about unfair taxes, tell me what you would propose that would be better for education. Keep in mind that you have a diverse population of children ranging from very well off to homeless. I would hope you want every child to have some education, because you would believe that an educated nation is a strong nation.
Please, provide a workable plan to educate our youth that does not include some social sharing of cost. Here at /. you'd get some great feed back and perhaps it can be presented to the President for consideration.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Evil compared to what? Mother Theresa and Ghandi perhaps, but compared to Facebook and the worst of the worst that is Microsoft they are still saints.
Actually, I'd class Google as a saint compared to Mother Teresa, who believed that suffering was good, and ensured it was widespread in her "hospices", and publicly stated that poverty should not be alleviated because it also was a good thing.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I remember when Alta Vista came out with natural language searches. You could ask it What's the name of President Clinton's cat? And it would give you links for where to buy socks.
I can't wait for you to leave slashdot.
People have such ridiculously selective memories about Alta Vista. Yes, it was once awesome, but it sucked because it had no search algorithm, it just matched keywords. This worked fine at first, but people (and by people I mean porn sites) pretty quickly learned that all it took to game the system was to put huge blocks of tiny text at the bottom of every page containing every keyword they could think of. Pretty soon, it didn't matter what you searched for, you got back the same 10 porn sites. So yes, Google became better than Alta Vista, because they figured out a system that was at least marginally difficult to game.
This guy is leaving for a good cause and all, but I've noticed a pattern of Google employees leaving lately. Even newer recruits don't seem to stay long. I wonder if they've taken the fun out of working there? Obviously, something has changed. It can't be the computing problems, because they still have huge challenges.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Khan uses the oldest educational technique in the book- the demonstration lecture. Its just packaged better. First someone who clearly explains it. Second in a right-length chunk of a few minutes, not a forced 60 minutes. And on demand, anywhere, not on a schedule at a certain location. And almost free, after it is done the first couple of times.
People have been trying a half century to properly use television and computers in education. This seems to be one of the better results.
I got an interview with Google in 1999, and I had the opportunity to have lunch with Craig. He never mentioned to me that he was the 1st employee at the time.
I do remember what he asked me. I was interviewing for the job of initializing their QA department. He asked me how I would look for problems in an indexer that stored MILLIONS (ha) of pages. I had to ask what exactly an indexer was.
On the way out, I spent too much time flirting with the hot red head they had at the front desk, and Larry walked by and saw what I was doing. I don't think that's why I didn't get the job though.
DAMMMMMNN I wish I got that job!!!!!!!!
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
You can either help pay for the lower classes to be educated, or you can deal with the consequences of having large numbers of uneducated unemployable people, and all the social problems that come with that. Which do you really think is better for you?
I choose not to have kids either. But I understand that I'm going to be a lot better off if the youth I have to deal with in the future are in school and not on the streets. If I send them to school now, I can live off of their tax dollars later. If I don't send them to school now, I'll be paying for their incarceration into the foreseeable future.
Investing in the society in which you live is a rational self-interested decision.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And please, do not say, "what good did it do?" Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, Americans are far better educated. The decline we perceive is mainly a factor of 1) relative comparisons to the rest of the world and 2) the inclusion of a higher percentage of the population in modern testing. There were no good old days.
But continuing to allow people to irresponsibly breed is also not working.
The birth rate in most developed countries is decreasing. Not because of any policy mandate, but because the people choose it. We need to figure out what they're doing and copy it.
What they're doing is educating their people, and providing opportunities for them. Educated people have fewer children. Moderately well off people have fewer children.
What we're doing in the US is the exact opposite. We're cutting education, we're expanding economic opportunities for the rich and not the lower classes. And when 30 years of ever increasing inequality bear fruit in social problems, conservatives will blame the very people they refused to help.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!