Re:Why Google Plus Will Prevail
by thisisnotatest on Tuesday January 08, 2013 @05:24PM
(#5028931)
I'm glad that you took my post good-naturedly, Michael. I let out a sigh of relief that this didn't immediately escalate. It sounds like you are dedicated to bettering yourself as you have more experiences and gain more perspective, which is an admirable trait. It's not my place to tell you what to do, but if you're open to input, I would timidly suggest the following: if you play the tape backwards and notice that, every few years, you find yourself distancing yourself from some of your extreme behaviors or stances from a few years earlier, then you could try to get ahead of that trend going forward.
Emphasis on "long". One year is not "long".
Ha, okay. I suppose we'd just have to take this to longbets.org.
I was a troll for a few years of my life, but I kicked the habit. However, some of my Google work was White Hat Trolling. I was trying to use the skills I'd learned in my trolling years for good-- to improve the company. I actually had lined up my exit about a month before I left, so I did some purely altruistic work (including outing a bad manager) on the way out.
You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave
Emphasis on "long". One year is not "long".
Five years from now, people at Google probably won't remember Google+ Games and I hope they don't remember me by name. Although I was right on G+ Games, I was right on something that seems to have been unimportant.
What I realize about my time at Google is that I wasted a lot of energy on minor issues. For example, C++ is not my favorite default language (it has its niche, but modern web development is not it). It sure as hell is not evil. Not a battle worth fighting. (Now that I've learned C and C++ a bit better, I enjoy them.) Google's HR practices-- closed and blind allocation, 18-month transfer block (extortion), manager-as-SPOF through secret calibration scores-- are Evil. If anyone is going to take up the cause of purging Google of rot, slime, and hate (not to say that Google has more of these than most large companies; I doubt it does, but few companies have "Don't Be Evil" as a motto) then that is where to strike.
What I am sure of is that, five years from now, no company will be able to call itself a cultural leader while retaining closed allocation. So, if Google wants to remain a cultural leader, it has no other choice than to implement open allocation. And hey, that's an idea that I was one of the first to propose.