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A comment on Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Googleplex Did Seem Rather Long.

Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by staunch on Friday July 20, 2007 @11:31AM (#35633)
The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company.

Holding 90% of the best engineers in the world "hostage" with six figure salaries and great perks is a good way to slow them down. I think they're scared of being blindsided, since that's what they did to Yahoo & co.

Google should be more brave and set them free. They can easily stay the best at snapping up early-stage startups. They already do this, but it should be their only strategy. Google should almost completely stop hiring direct.

I guess this is really just "Hiring is Obsolete" from a slightly different perspective. That it might be evil of Google to jealously "horde" hackers out of fear.

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Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by geebee on Friday July 20, 2007 @01:48PM (#35679)
I agree. It may seem funny to think that google is better off paying them 100M for their company instead of 150K in salary - but presumably, google pays that much for startups because they're worth it. Hard to believe that a 150K house plant does all that much direct damage to google (wall street expectations aside, their numbers were pretty excellent) - but the opportunity cost of keeping an office fern from growing into a redwood may be very high.

assuming google gets to buy them out...

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Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by menloparkbum on Friday July 20, 2007 @02:08PM (#35688)
FYI Google doesn't pay incoming engineers anywhere near 150K.
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Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by geebee on Friday July 20, 2007 @05:20PM (#35729)
Yeah, it was just a guess. But I figure that after someone has had enough time to get complacent, he/she's probably at a pretty senior level and is making more dough.
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Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by schoudha on Friday July 20, 2007 @02:29PM (#35698)
"The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company."

I'm not sure what qualifies you to make that statement. Do you work at Google?

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Re:Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Go... by mynameishere on Friday July 20, 2007 @02:46PM (#35709)
Let me answer that for him. Google has X great products and Y employees. (...etc)
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