Husafan

When paying by the token, don't the labs have a strong incentive to make the model as verbose as possible?

My point here is that my managers thought the latency of Google Maps was important, doing good work on it got me promoted, it was not a product launch, and things like this are happening all the time across the organization.

At a high level, promo is an incentive that directors and VPs use to keep an org working towards strategic goals. You may disagree with those goals, but that doesn't necessarily mean promo is broken.

My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is.

I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.

Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!

It doesn't have to be crispr introducing reach mutation.

It's like saying Lebron James' DNA is basketball because that's how he makes all his money. In reality, his DNA is his natural athletic abilities. Basketball is something he does well because of it.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/e-totalitaria...

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/

For people that already have misgivings about interviewing for a position at Google, I'm sure this post was a god send.

I mean, after reading all those "google is great" love-posts, you read one that points out flaws, and all of the sudden that's the one to read? All the others go out the window? How does that work?

It really doesn't get much more subjective than this.

While it is interesting to learn new tidbits of information about them, I am also very aware of the fact that, for instance, none of them live in Mountain View. If I decided I wanted to move there, the first thing I would do is turn to Google to learn about real-estate, utilities, getting a driver's license, etc. I don't quite see how placing the constraints of a social graph on top of a search for unknown information will make that search more useful. When stepping into uncharted territory, I don't want artificial limitations on what I find.

Beyond that, marketing is nothing more than swaying people's opinions. If you engage in marketing, and convince people you have the best content, and Google picks up on that and increases the page rank accordingly, I'd say they are doing exactly what they advertise.