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Comment by pchristensen | Hacker News Reader

"The free food and transportation are great perks and all, but let’s get real here. Without the financial upside those stock options represent, Google employees will start looking elsewhere."

Free food and transportation might be even more valuable now.

Anyone that wants to work at a big company won't find better stock options and definitely not a better work environment. Anyone that wants to work in a startup environment was going to leave Google eventually. So no, Googler's won't be running for the door.

I'd be interested to see how the internal market for reselling stock options looks right now.

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Forget about food and transportation... having a job will be the most valuable thing of them all.

I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh.

Exactly. I am no longer convinced that people actually think before writing TC articles.

TC has basically become part of the mainstream media then? That's a shame, I guess it's back to the Economist for me

Did you ever find TC to be on level with The Economist, or even in the same ballpark? Or hell, even the same sport?

TechCrunch does one thing very well, which is up to the moment headlines (on a rapidly changing industry) with just enough commentary that you can get a feel for what happened. It's one very small notch above a Twitter feed. If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

I dunno... I already wrote TC off as a waste of my time along with things like valleywag quite some time ago, so I could easily be ignorantly biased, but for me I'd describe them as mainly being "good" at link-baity bullshit titles + wild trollish theories about what could happen presented as fact press release style to stir up interest... I'm sure they have some value, but it all comes down to that magical signal-to-noise ratio question... and this article here doesn't appear so bad but also doesn't seem very good either....

Yeah, I don't know. I think TC is pretty good at giving you breaking startup news. I think you could pretty much read nothing but the headlines and get about 95% of full value out of it, while saving yourself about 90% of the time involved.

If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

Quite the contrary; I want TC to report start-up news. That's it. I don't want any editorials, op-eds, or analysis. Why? Because, as many many articles including this one prove, they are nearly always completely ignorant of the situation and say ridiculously stupid shit as a result.

They do that well, as you said, but it's when they go beyond the bare necessities and actual facts into the realm of "analysis" that the writers (and editors and everyone else between an article and my face) fall flat on their asses and cause my blood pressure to rise in the process.

"Shit, I can't swim. I know I can't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass outta the pool."

I don't think TC even cares if their analysis is sensible.

For them, the value is long comment-threads and inlinks/clickthroughs. And bad analysis often gets more such attention... so bad analysis is what they prefer to provide.

Indeed. I live in a fantasy world where people who "report the news" do so in a manner where only facts are presented and any opinions or analyses are backed up by trustworthy, informed, unbiased sources. I realize that world doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean I won't stop berating those who create "news" for this one.

Sadly, your point is an oft-relevant one so my only recourse is to read TC even less than I do now, which is to say stop reading the articles that show up here.

They have had a few in-depth analysis articles, or at least somewhat close. I was suggesting that it was one direction that they could have gone in instead of being the typical mainstream "report shit as it hits the fan".

Recognizing that probably none of us are old enough to have seen a downturn of this scale; the demand for quality talent didn't seem to diminish much in our other recent downturns.

"I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh."

Its not like Google is best company in the world(those days are gone). Even if, company doesnt matter to me,what matters is only the work(and the smartness of co-workers) what Iam doing. I would any day better compromise on the smartness of co-workers as opposed to compromising the quality of work. By this, there could be a lot of better jobs elsewhere.

Agreed, but offering free food, transportation, health care, cell phone, etc is an awesome & possibly economical perk.

Most of that stuff can be paid for with pre tax dollars as opposed to having to pay for it yourself with after tax dollars.

The place I used to work paid for my phone, breakfast, daily lunches, insurance and metro card. My only fixed costs each month were groceries, dinner, rent, cable/internet, minor personal items & student loans.

I thought they were cutting back on the free food etc.? Remember Sergey's comment about the M&M's and bottled water?

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