You think my comment is sycophantic? If so, only on the surface. Another way to read what I wrote is that google has robbed the world of many smart people. Instead of contributing meaningfully, these people - trapped through money and inertia - spend their days doing useless work for an ad company. What a pity.
That is true of all of capitalism, that is true of 2 billion people on this wonderful planet that live on scraps. They didn't decide to be born in their condition any more than we ours.
One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.
I went to a google users' group meeting once - maybe 15 years ago. I got to chatting with this smarmy ~22 year old googler who was there. We somehow got onto the topic of ruby on rails - which I've barely used. He very loudly and confidently told me rails was bad technology, and people who used it were idiots. I asked him about his experience using rails - and he said he's never used it before. I asked him the obvious question - why does he thinks its bad if he's never used it before? "I don't need to use it."
We went back and forth. He readily admitted he didn't know anything about rails. But his position was essentially that because he worked at google, he was smart enough to know rails is bad without needing to actually know anything about it. He was beyond needing any facts or experience to know it was bad.
It was amazing. I've never seen someone convince me they were an absolute tosser like that before. Nothing I could say would make him think twice about his stupid opinion.
But, Google isn't that one guy. They have 183 000 employees. Thats a really large number of people - more people than most of us will meet in our lifetime. They have some entitled wankers for sure. But also, some of the best people I've ever worked with are googlers or ex-googlers. I'm sure Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are just the same. You don't really work with the hundreds of thousands of people at the company. You work with the dozen or so people on your team. At the end of the day, getting on with them is what actually counts.
