From 2012, to 2016, to 2020, google bled an incredible amount of key talent
I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it
Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO
What you "need" to do is a dangerous trigger word. Almost always the perceived need is based on a particular understanding of trade-offs that could be misguided. One engineer's need to recover some technical debt (while noble, of course) might be the opposite for CEO, who might be seeing a bigger picture existential need to the business. A thing is... See more
Code wins arguments. If we tested a feature and didn’t like it, we rebuilt it until we landed on the best version. For some surfaces, like the activity feed, we rewrote it three times before we finally landed on an implementation that felt good enough.
About 15 minutes into the interrogation at the scene, Officer Garcia - I still remember him - knowing my mental state of panic and realization of reality, said to me "You know, when I was your age I did the same thing, and I was forgiven and let go. So what I'm going to do is forgive you and let you go this time. Go home, and don't ever do this... See more
And if you make a successful alternative App Store, and get, say, 100m people in the EU to install it, you'll owe Apple €50m/year as a "Core Technology Fee".
NO GATEKEEPING HERE, EU! None at all! Full compliance, totally. Pinky promise!!
I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in... See more