Husafan

I don't see how any of this is specific to Google. Everything you've said here is how companies function. If you want to work on things that are not important to your manager, why should you expect anything? And bad managers exist everywhere.

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.

I disagree. Add a couple of these features, put them behind an experiment flag, and inspect metrics that matter. What usage are they getting? Do users in the experiment use the product more frequently? And for longer periods? If not, perhaps feature parity with Excel is not the highest impact project, despite the feature requests. If you are finding it hard to come up with measures that show impact towards your orgs' OKRs, this is also a signal that your pet project may not be the best thing for you to spend time on in the eyes of your bosses.

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.

During my interview process, my recruiter was very much my advocate. Have you talked to them honestly about this? It should not hurt you. I'm sorry you're going through this.

I've been at Google for 12 years, and this has not been my experience. While it is a popular narrative, it is by no means dominant, and is fairly specific to individual teams. I got my second promotion leading the Google Maps Desktop Latency team. We demonstrated impact solely by reducing load latency and increasing performance while advocating for latency consciousness across the product space and implementing latency regression tests and monitoring. Google has some of the most complex infrastructure in existence, and there are thousands of engineers that are getting promoted and finding gratification in maintaining and improving this infrastructure.

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.

I think the weekly post idea really applies to the reader, not the writer. Perhaps you could get around this with a "digest" style of posting. I.e. I can write as many posts as I want, but it will only be published once a week as a digest of posts. This might fit better with human behavior too as it lowers the cost of a single post while still achieving the goal of updating friends on what's happening at a spaced interval.

Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!

Discuss amongst yourselves.

My understanding is that this is what gain of function research is all about. Accelerated evolution within a lab towards infecting a specific species.

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

Because China has political internment camps.

Can you recommend any resources that lay out this history?

I don't know why this got down voted. I found this extremely helpful and well written. Thank you.

I don't think this fits the analogy. The DNA was/is search tech long before ads came around.

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.

Also, some people work harder than others.

Perhaps this guy's promoting his book:

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

Combine with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421597 and perhaps sentience gets achieved in a Google cluster. :)

Yes, terribly cynical. There are prominently displayed donation links. Perhaps they can also use donations?

Nice android. :)

http://xkcd.com/192/

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?

"Even more important, however, is the fact that we have a clear path to economic recovery, while Greece doesn’t."

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

So you're telling me that it is (prohibitively) difficult to maintain a couple of free-form text areas where users can list interests, past jobs, etc. for their FRIENDS to see without linking to public pages? I know this isn't beyond Facebook's engineering or infrastructure and it stinks of agenda, not evolution.

But you're not giving him a choice.. Why, after putting it off "too many," times, does it not give the choice to NOT link and not be asked anymore?

No more so than a small start-up with your friends. Groupthink has far more to do with the work environment than the size of the group.

For the rest of the world to stop aiding and abetting them becoming the next great economic superpower based on principled reasons.

Maybe because those requests are part of a lawful subpoena? I'm sure things would be different if they were busy getting hacked by the CIA and FBI.

If I know the name of an event I'm looking for, I just Google it. They have a "spider."

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is the right forum for a public health care debate.

I would love the ability to designate parent/child relationships between stories.

Another obstacle I think Facebook will eventually run into is the fact that social graphs, to me at least, seem fairly static. I am not a celebrity, and for me, literally ALL of my Facebook friends are people I know in real life.

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.

Forget Google Wave.. How is this different from Google Groups?

This is a fairly silly gripe. There is no objective measure for "best," content. Google has done a great job of finding relevant results for a given topic, and as the previous poster pointed out, they are constantly making adjustments to prevent "gaming," of the system as you describe it.

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.

What we mean by "intelligence," must also be considered. As they are, computers are most useful for solving problems where a solution is known, theoretically, to exist.

For example, you know there are articles on the internet concerning Javascript, and when you ask google to point you towards them, the relevance of the returned results is often viewed as a measure of the algorithm's "intelligence." But behind this intelligent response lies complex but defined probability calculations that are provably correct given a known algorithm. On the other hand, can you ever imagine asking the questions, "Computer, does this shirt look good on me?" or, "Computer, what is the most ethical course of action in this situation?" How a human responds to these questions helps indicate that human's level of intelligence. But different people could also disagree on the above questions and still be considered intelligent.

To me, it doesn't seem to make much sense to invest in computers that are modeled after humans, as there are certain types of situations where even the most intelligent of these machines could be wrong as a matter of opinion. Rather, the more powerful computers become, the more sense it makes to have them tackle finite problem spaces more efficiently. Because of this, I don't really see the case where human intelligence and computer intelligence would or should converge. Put simply, it would NEVER make sense to give Skynet control of our nukes.