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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are.

What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity can be reversed.

I actually can't decide what would be the best strategy from the CEO's point of view. I.e. how best to govern an aging, established tech company like Google? I really like what Aswath Damodaran said about Google - there's a "sugar daddy effect" - the various departments lack desperation to make it, unlike startups.

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This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android)

I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI.

We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within Google.

That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian mentions.

That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.

Thanks. What also surprises me is that coworkers have little desire to start side-projects or startups. But that's probably because those who do have left already.

By the way, I was developing for Android since its early days (before the first Android phone was released) and mostly switched to iOS development few years ago.

I have to say that the Android SDK (and the UI/UX too) was underwhelming, although it started to get better at some point. It felt like the developers were not top talent and / or were under pressure to ship functionality quickly without having the time to step back and think hard about design and simplicity. The most notable example of this is the activity / fragment lifecycle (also known as the "lolcycle").

Why are you surprised by people that don’t work on side projects?

That's not what I said. I don't currently work on any side project. But I have a desire to and I like to think about and discuss project ideas. I assumed everyone is like this.

It's really oddly no. I know what you mean and its hard to word. But yeah there's not a "fundamental interest" like you'd expect.

All the stuff seems "obvious" in retrospect, like...oh...a lot of you went to MIT and did Computer Science because that's what people do but...you went to college to get a degree to get a job, you didn't necessarily become absorbed in it.

But then again most other tech jobs I've been in had that quality 100%. Life is weird.

(I'm a dropout from a state school with a 2.8 GPA, and I honestly don't know if I've ever felt more 'alien' anywhere other than Google.)

The "sugar daddy effect" sounds an awful lot like benefiting from anticompetitive practices to the net detriment of society.

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