[HN Gopher] Google was incorporated 25 years ago on September 4 ...
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Google was incorporated 25 years ago on September 4 1998
Author : cpymchn
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-09-05 21:46 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.google)
| paxys wrote:
| Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent
| years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google
| for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat
| their engineers.
|
| People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two
| may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants,
| benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked
| pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day
| are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to
| build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that
| the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being
| a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-
| Google.
| russ wrote:
| 100%. My dad was an electrical engineer in the 70s and 80s and
| ended up transitioning to sales, given that it paid much more.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I seem to recall that at one point Microsoft guaranteed to
| match Google's offers, because Google had clearly figured out
| how to hire the best engineers.
| [deleted]
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| It certainly doesn't seem that way now, unless there is a
| massive skew in titles (maybe an L4 at Google is given Senior
| Engineer 2 at MSFT or something?)
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure how much of it is Google and how much is just a
| broader collection of SV companies, but engineering salaries,
| including software, in general were much more conventional
| professional salaries until at least the dot-com era. I started
| with a computer company for about $40K in the mid-80s so a bit
| over $100K today with nothing special with repect to other
| benefits.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Yes, no. They are also a major proponent of open office space,
| and (at least the group that I worked for was) very intolerant
| of remote work pre-pandemic. It was very grating to see all
| these showy spaces (cafes, gyms, theaters, climbing walls, ball
| pits etc) that were featured in the REWS (Google Real Estate
| and Workplace Services) newsletters, with absolutely no focus
| on the overcrowded open office spaces that engineers were
| forced to work in.
|
| I left Google for Netflix mostly because of my inability to
| work remotely for Google, and the group I work for in Netflix
| being remote friendly.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Google has lost lawsuits for colluding with Apple to suppress
| the wages of its employees
| psychoslave wrote:
| Hmm, I still fail to realize that, as except flexible work
| hours, none of this is matching my experience as a software
| engineer. I live in Europe though.
|
| It's not that I complain of my situation: I'm healthy, have a
| loving family, and work with a great team which is full of
| kindness and which is part of an international group, something
| that let me exchange with people from all around the world as
| part of my job in a full remote position.
|
| So this is just to say that not all SE live in this ultra-
| privileged bubble. :)
| jhp123 wrote:
| thank you oh benevolent Google, for allowing supply and demand
| to set labor prices after the DOJ shut down your wage fixing
| scheme
| frank_bb wrote:
| [dead]
| mooreds wrote:
| Interesting podcast which touches on this too:
| https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report...
| paulpauper wrote:
| Tivo became a verb too but it only a tiny tiny as fraction as
| big of a company. I think found it convenient to say
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > The goals of the advertising business model do not always
| correspond to providing quality search to users.
|
| - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
| Hypertextual Web Search Engine
| crazygringo wrote:
| But fortunately market competition ensures that a higher-
| quality search engine is only ever a click away.
|
| So the bar for quality search is always going to remain pretty
| high, in order not to simply go out of business.
| throw_awy_1 wrote:
| And here's 20 Billion dollars that disagrees with you. If
| switching was just a "click away" why would Google pay Apple
| $20B per year to be the default search for iOS etc.
|
| https://macdailynews.com/2023/02/21/google-pays-
| apple-20-bil...
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Thanks for all the rubbish...
| dnw wrote:
| And their first data center contract on 28/09/1998
| https://x.com/uhoelzle/status/1442040678167375877
| blamazon wrote:
| How do I see the rest of this thread? I can only see one tweet.
| therealmarv wrote:
| https://nitter.net/uhoelzle/status/1442040678167375877
| blamazon wrote:
| TY! That was interesting and I learned that their first
| servers can be viewed in various museums. While web
| searching that, I found this interesting tangent, a Lego
| cased storage array from 1996:
|
| http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display
| /...
| ctoth wrote:
| This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded
| as a bad move.
| paulddraper wrote:
| (The creation of the universe, as described by the Hitchhiker's
| Guide to the Galaxy)
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(page generated 2023-09-05 23:00 UTC)