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Comment by codeonfire | Hacker News Reader

The motivation of Google is not even discussed here. Why do you want to create a certain environment for "smart creatives?" Oh yeah, almost forgot... so they'll make products that will make Google lots of money. This always leads to a logic contradiction. If they are so smart and creative, why do they need Google? Everyone knows if you create the next g-mail you still walk in on Monday and get a salary, not equity. You might get a huge bonus, or Google might choose get another airliner instead. That's a risk you'll be taking.

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> If they are so smart and creative, why do they need Google?

Many things cannot be created individually, no matter how smart and creative you are. Think of pyramids, space ships, - or even GMail. It's about leveraging the resources of a big company.

And not to forget the low risk: you build something while you are on salary vs. building something for equity that may or may not worth dollars in the end.

Just a tip: you don't want to be one of the people building a pyramid. You may want to think of a non-enslavement-and-death example when you explain why somewhere might be a good place to work. I can just imagine the recruiter's pitch now...

I thought it was generally accepted now that the pyramids weren't built by slaves.

Why? That slave labour was used to build pyramids is a popular but unfounded belief. There is evidence suggesting that some pyramids were built by well-paid government contractors.

Also apparently American-type slavery was a historical abberation. A typical slave in the past was not unlike a salaried employee today. He was well-treated, earned good money for his services and was able to free himself after accumulating enough of it, which is not unlike the FU money many a startup founder wants to have.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...

[1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/manumission.pdf

>free himself after accumulating enough of it

If you don't think enslavement to a particular person is worse than working now, you need a reality check.

Do I? I mind you, "enslavement" has bad connotations mostly thanks to United States, it wasn't that bad in the ancient past.

Also consider that technology sector is somewhat special in this regard. Your typical unskilled worker is pretty much a wage slave. Many a slave in the past (again, excluding US) was in much better situation than your average friendly neighbourhood supermarket clerk.

> Many a slave in the past (again, excluding US) was in much better situation than your average friendly neighbourhood supermarket clerk.

Unless you are using some exotic definition of enslavement, there is a fundamental difference between slave an employee. A slave is a property of his owner [0], thus slave has no agency and is completely dependent on her/his owner decisions. Employee may choose to be dependent on her/his employer to any extent she/he chooses, but it is her/his choice. You may argue that both slave and employer may end up being completely dependent on her/his owner/employer, but from the point of view of the law and society the situation is always completely different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

There are other ways of enforced labour as well as slavery, and some are quite close to home. Indentured workers, and poor houses for example, and the company scrip, are slightly less brutal forms of something similar to slavery, as are workers in the penal system. In all of these systems the workers aren't really able to walk away from their "owner". And some of this is fairly recent involving Ikea [4] and Walmart [5].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/business/global/ikea-to-re... [5] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/05/mexico-walmex-idUS...

Not all slavery is chattel slavery.

I've cited pyramids as an example of what collaborative work can lead to. Of course it's not like slavery, but there's a lot of grinding going on even at Google, they just call it "passion for work".

Ok but if everyone is designing pyramids, and no one is building them, then pyramids never get built. At some point anything big just requires a ton of hard human work to actually be created.

"If they are so smart and creative, why do they need Google?"

Because not everybody wants to build a company.

I made my own company,in the end I become greatly successful, but it took a lot of work, my savings, risks, people around(friends and family), telling me I was crazy, that I should be working for the man because it was safe.

It is not for everybody. I have people working for me that are smarter and more creative than me, but they don't want to be leaders, or do public speaking, or go out of the lab, talk to the customer, or making risks.

If you make a company, or if you work for yourself, you need to do all those things and more in a competent way.

> If they are so smart and creative, why do they need Google?

I can't speak for everybody, but there are plenty of things I can do at Google that I cannot do on my own. Google engineers have access to world class compute clusters, CDNs, data analysis tools, and state of the art libraries for machine learning, speech, nlp, dnn, etc. Having resources like that available empowers creative people to hack around on their big ideas.

"Smart and Creative" does not mean "Lucrative". Less cynically, one might consider it a virtuous circle. Google gives smart and creative people a chance to organize into small teams and innovate. When some of those projects become lucrative, more smart and creative people can be hired, and so on.

I've certainly found myself at odds between projects I'd Love to tackle versus bills that Have to get paid. After enough failures and false starts, it becomes less personal risk and more general survival. I look forward to going out on my own again and trying some more, but I need to contribute to my current employer first as I save up the energy and resources for my next personal endeavor.

I have a question - aren't there any other companies that follow the same culture? Especially outside Patriot™ zone?

You'd have conceived a system used by billions though

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