It really pains me how Google has changed. When I was younger I always wanted to work there. Now that I've graduated college, I would probably never want to work there.
It seems to be the nature of companies getting bigger and older. When I was 10 I wanted to work for Microsoft when I grew up - this was 1991, when Microsoft products were the clear leaders in most PC software markets but they had yet to seem like the evil monopolist they would become. By the time I was in college, I was running Linux on my laptop just so that I didn't support the evil empire. By 27 I was working for Google, which was the hip non-evil place to be at the time.
Go get involved in crypto and find some projects that are actually building stuff instead of pumping the price. That's the historical analogy - IMHO we're right about at 2002 in the cycle, after the new technology bubble bursts but before anyone knows who the winners will be, or if they even exist. If you're successful people will hate you anyway because that's the nature of success, but at least you can get a decade or two of feeling like your work means something in before that.
I think it has to do with size/status too, I couldn't imagine ever wanting to spend my life making a couple of the richest people in the world a tiny bit more marginally wealthy. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page and Brin all still want more and work smart young people like dogs to get it. Not for me.
I agree. However, for every person who doesn't want to work there, five others are willing to join the company, especially those who live overseas and are willing to work for pennies.
As long as homes in the bay area are regularly going for $2m and Google is one of the extremely few companies that has an attainable $400k+ TC... I don't see a shortage of people applying in the bay area either.
The Dragonfly issue would be a line in the sand for me, but they haven't crossed it yet. (Though even starting work on it is more than I'd expect from the old Google.)
