Why did I leave Google?
Well, well, I give up: everyone wants to know why I left. And since it is impossible to answer each one individually, here is an exposition in a long form. Read a little (I will reach the climax in the 3rd paragraph) or read everything. But I’ll start with a warning: there’s no drama, no super-interesting details, no beatings by former colleagues, and there’s nothing that you couldn’t guess from what is going on in the press around Google and its relationship to software developers and user privacy. data. This is just my personal story.
Leaving Google was not an easy decision. During my work there I became a rather passionate fan of the company. I spoke at four Google Developer Day, at two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific member of the Google Test blog. Recruiters often asked me to help persuade very promising candidates to work in the company. No one was supposed to ask me twice to support Google, and no one was more surprised that I could not continue this. In fact, the last three months of working at Google have been a whirlwind of despair in a vain attempt to regain past passion.
Google, which I loved, was a technology company that gave workers the opportunity to invent. Google, which I left, became an advertising company with a single corporate-imposed focus.
I think, technically, Google has always been an advertising campaign, but over the past three years, I, fortunately, have not felt this. Google was an advertising campaign in the same sense as a good TV series advertising campaign: great content attracts advertisers.
')
Under Eric Schmidt, advertising was always in the background. Google was run as a factory of innovation, encouraging employees to do business with founders' rewards, bonuses and 20% of the time. Advertising revenue gave us a reserve for thought, invention and creation. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and Open Source were the springboard for our inventions. The fact that it was all paid for by an ATM full of advertising spoils did not reach us. It probably came to the engineers who designed the ad specifically, but everyone else was convinced that Google was primarily a technology company; a company that hired smart people and staked a major stake in their ability to innovate.
Strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome came out of this innovation machine: products that were the result of initiatives at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such an irrepressible innovative spirit sometimes leads to setbacks. There were such and Google, but the company always knew how to quickly fall, get up and draw conclusions.
In such circumstances, you should not be part of any special “inner circle” for success. You should not be lucky to get a cool project where you can make a career. Anyone with ideas or the ability to collaborate can contribute their share. During this time, I had several opportunities to leave Google, but I could not imagine a better place to work.
But as they say, it was then, and now - it is now.
It turned out that there was one thing on which the innovative Google machine had stalled, and this thing was of tremendous importance: competition with Facebook. Informal attempts gave birth to a couple of associations in Wave and Buzz. Orkut did not catch on outside Brazil. Like the notorious Hare 1 , confident enough in its superiority to snooze, Google woke up from its “social dreams” to discover a threat to its status as a leader in advertising.
Google is still advertising more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows a lot more about these people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this personal knowledge so much that they even agree to put the Facebook brand in front of their own. For example, facebook.com/nike - the company with the power and influence of Nike puts its brand after Facebook! No company has ever done this with Google, and it took it to heart.
Larry Page personally took over the command to fix it. “Social” has become a “state”, corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name, implying that Google alone was no longer enough. The search was supposed to be social. Android was supposed to be social. Youtube, once cheerful in its independence, was supposed to be ... well, you understood. Worst of all, innovation had to be social. Ideas in which Google+ was not at the center of the universe became a distraction.
Suddenly, 20% became a window dressing. Google Labs has been closed. App Engine has inflated prices. APIs that have been free for years, outdated, or have become paid. Since the signs of entrepreneurship were dismantled, mocking talk about the “old” Google and its weak attempts to compete with Facebook formed the rationale of the “new” Google, which promised to devote more resources to a smaller number of products 2 .
The days of old Google, hiring smart people and encouraging them to create the future, are irretrievably gone. New Google without a shadow of a doubt knew how the future should look. When employees misunderstood the future, corporate intervention drove them on the right track.
Officially, Google said that the “sharing on the web is broken,” and only a complete return and consolidation of our brains around Google+ will be able to fix it. You have to admire a company that is ready to sacrifice sacred cows and rally their talent in response to the threat to their business. If Google were right, obviously, many of us wanted to be part of the result of heroic efforts. I bought it. I worked on Google+ as a director of developers and gave me a lot of code. But the world and the sharing did not change. The controversial question is whether we made Facebook better, but all I could show in favor of Google+ was high marks in reviews.
As it turned out, the sharing did not break. It worked great, just Google was not part of it. People calmly exchanged around us and looked quite happy. Exodus from Facebook did not happen. I couldn’t even get a second time to look at Google+ on my own teenage daughter. “Social is not a product,” she told me after the demonstration, “Social is people, and people are all on Facebook.” Google was a major child who, having discovered that he was not called to a party, arranged his own in retaliation. And the fact that no one came to the Google party, became the dress of the naked king 3 .
Google+ and I ... we just were not destined together. The truth is, I'm never a fan of advertising. I do not click on ads. It scares me when Gmail shows ads based on what I write in the letters. I don’t want my search results to contain the gossip of Google+ posters (or Facebook or Twitter). When I look for “Walk through the pubs of London”, I want a better result than the sponsored offer “Buy a walk through the pubs of London in Walmart”.
The old Google got rich on advertising because it had good content, like TV used to be: make the best program, and you will get more profit from advertising. The new Google seems to be more focused on advertising itself.
Perhaps Google is right. Perhaps the future lies in exploring as much information as possible about our private life. Maybe Google knows better when I should call my mom, or that my life would be better if I bought something at a Nordstorm sale. Perhaps if they annoyed me enough with unoccupied windows in my calendar, I would do more sports. Perhaps if they offer me an advertisement for a divorce lawyer (because I am writing a letter about my 14-year-old son who has left his girlfriend), I will appreciate this advertisement so much that I will divorce myself. Or maybe I will get to it all with my own mind?
Old google was a great place to work. But the new ...
-one
Translator's Notes :
1 - a fairy tale about the Hare and the Turtle.
2 - Larry Page’s phrase “more wood behind fewer arrows” when announcing the closure of Google Labs. It was originally a favorite phrase of Scott McNealy, former director of Sun Microsystems.
3 semantic translation of the English idioms elephant in the room.
PS According to numerous requests from readers and in order to avoid disputes "Google" vs "Google", the name of the company is corrected to English.
Leaving Google was not an easy decision. During my work there I became a rather passionate fan of the company. I spoke at four Google Developer Day, at two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific member of the Google Test blog. Recruiters often asked me to help persuade very promising candidates to work in the company. No one was supposed to ask me twice to support Google, and no one was more surprised that I could not continue this. In fact, the last three months of working at Google have been a whirlwind of despair in a vain attempt to regain past passion.
Google, which I loved, was a technology company that gave workers the opportunity to invent. Google, which I left, became an advertising company with a single corporate-imposed focus.
I think, technically, Google has always been an advertising campaign, but over the past three years, I, fortunately, have not felt this. Google was an advertising campaign in the same sense as a good TV series advertising campaign: great content attracts advertisers.
')
Under Eric Schmidt, advertising was always in the background. Google was run as a factory of innovation, encouraging employees to do business with founders' rewards, bonuses and 20% of the time. Advertising revenue gave us a reserve for thought, invention and creation. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and Open Source were the springboard for our inventions. The fact that it was all paid for by an ATM full of advertising spoils did not reach us. It probably came to the engineers who designed the ad specifically, but everyone else was convinced that Google was primarily a technology company; a company that hired smart people and staked a major stake in their ability to innovate.
Strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome came out of this innovation machine: products that were the result of initiatives at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such an irrepressible innovative spirit sometimes leads to setbacks. There were such and Google, but the company always knew how to quickly fall, get up and draw conclusions.
In such circumstances, you should not be part of any special “inner circle” for success. You should not be lucky to get a cool project where you can make a career. Anyone with ideas or the ability to collaborate can contribute their share. During this time, I had several opportunities to leave Google, but I could not imagine a better place to work.
But as they say, it was then, and now - it is now.
It turned out that there was one thing on which the innovative Google machine had stalled, and this thing was of tremendous importance: competition with Facebook. Informal attempts gave birth to a couple of associations in Wave and Buzz. Orkut did not catch on outside Brazil. Like the notorious Hare 1 , confident enough in its superiority to snooze, Google woke up from its “social dreams” to discover a threat to its status as a leader in advertising.
Google is still advertising more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows a lot more about these people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this personal knowledge so much that they even agree to put the Facebook brand in front of their own. For example, facebook.com/nike - the company with the power and influence of Nike puts its brand after Facebook! No company has ever done this with Google, and it took it to heart.
Larry Page personally took over the command to fix it. “Social” has become a “state”, corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name, implying that Google alone was no longer enough. The search was supposed to be social. Android was supposed to be social. Youtube, once cheerful in its independence, was supposed to be ... well, you understood. Worst of all, innovation had to be social. Ideas in which Google+ was not at the center of the universe became a distraction.
Suddenly, 20% became a window dressing. Google Labs has been closed. App Engine has inflated prices. APIs that have been free for years, outdated, or have become paid. Since the signs of entrepreneurship were dismantled, mocking talk about the “old” Google and its weak attempts to compete with Facebook formed the rationale of the “new” Google, which promised to devote more resources to a smaller number of products 2 .
The days of old Google, hiring smart people and encouraging them to create the future, are irretrievably gone. New Google without a shadow of a doubt knew how the future should look. When employees misunderstood the future, corporate intervention drove them on the right track.
Officially, Google said that the “sharing on the web is broken,” and only a complete return and consolidation of our brains around Google+ will be able to fix it. You have to admire a company that is ready to sacrifice sacred cows and rally their talent in response to the threat to their business. If Google were right, obviously, many of us wanted to be part of the result of heroic efforts. I bought it. I worked on Google+ as a director of developers and gave me a lot of code. But the world and the sharing did not change. The controversial question is whether we made Facebook better, but all I could show in favor of Google+ was high marks in reviews.
As it turned out, the sharing did not break. It worked great, just Google was not part of it. People calmly exchanged around us and looked quite happy. Exodus from Facebook did not happen. I couldn’t even get a second time to look at Google+ on my own teenage daughter. “Social is not a product,” she told me after the demonstration, “Social is people, and people are all on Facebook.” Google was a major child who, having discovered that he was not called to a party, arranged his own in retaliation. And the fact that no one came to the Google party, became the dress of the naked king 3 .
Google+ and I ... we just were not destined together. The truth is, I'm never a fan of advertising. I do not click on ads. It scares me when Gmail shows ads based on what I write in the letters. I don’t want my search results to contain the gossip of Google+ posters (or Facebook or Twitter). When I look for “Walk through the pubs of London”, I want a better result than the sponsored offer “Buy a walk through the pubs of London in Walmart”.
The old Google got rich on advertising because it had good content, like TV used to be: make the best program, and you will get more profit from advertising. The new Google seems to be more focused on advertising itself.
Perhaps Google is right. Perhaps the future lies in exploring as much information as possible about our private life. Maybe Google knows better when I should call my mom, or that my life would be better if I bought something at a Nordstorm sale. Perhaps if they annoyed me enough with unoccupied windows in my calendar, I would do more sports. Perhaps if they offer me an advertisement for a divorce lawyer (because I am writing a letter about my 14-year-old son who has left his girlfriend), I will appreciate this advertisement so much that I will divorce myself. Or maybe I will get to it all with my own mind?
Old google was a great place to work. But the new ...
-one
Translator's Notes :
1 - a fairy tale about the Hare and the Turtle.
2 - Larry Page’s phrase “more wood behind fewer arrows” when announcing the closure of Google Labs. It was originally a favorite phrase of Scott McNealy, former director of Sun Microsystems.
3 semantic translation of the English idioms elephant in the room.
PS According to numerous requests from readers and in order to avoid disputes "Google" vs "Google", the name of the company is corrected to English.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/140070/
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