Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers.
People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-Google.
Google does indeed deserve kudos for being an early adopter of great benefits, WLB, cool offices, etc. But I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for "sky high" compensation. I had a classmate with competing offers from both MS and Google back in 2007 - the Google offer was pretty close to MS's offer, both at the time and over the prior decade.
A big reason why silicon valley comp rose so much in the last decade was because major companies were previously colluding to suppress worker wages. And yes, this includes Google. It ended in 2009, and that's when tech compensation really exploded. See link at bottom.
If anything I would give Facebook far more credit. They were willing to pay more than any other major tech company. And more importantly, they also refused to participate in the aforementioned cartel, which resulted in a ton of poaching atcivity which drove up market wages.
Agreed on many counts but they did collude (with Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm allegedly due to bullying from Apple) to suppress poaching workers from each other. I'd say Facebook played a huge role in refusing to collude (as can be seen from this exchange between Sheryl Sandberg and Jonathan Rosenberg [1]) and thus driving up worker wages due to competition.
Yes, no. They are also a major proponent of open office space, and (at least the group that I worked for was) very intolerant of remote work pre-pandemic. It was very grating to see all these showy spaces (cafes, gyms, theaters, climbing walls, ball pits etc) that were featured in the REWS (Google Real Estate and Workplace Services) newsletters, with absolutely no focus on the overcrowded open office spaces that engineers were forced to work in.
I left Google for Netflix mostly because of my inability to work remotely for Google, and the group I work for in Netflix being remote friendly.
> People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-Google.
Were you working in the Valley? Because a decade before Google I co-founded a company and while we didn't have in house chefs (we were a bootstrap) we had the rest. And not because we were special -- the three of us who co-founded the company were used to those things from our own prior employers.
Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the highest ideal, I remember hearing the opinion that if you can't get a tenure-track job, Google is a pretty good second choice because it's “just like a university”: you had (so the story went) freedom to do whatever you wanted, smart peers, “talks at Google” from the best speakers, … and there were perks (free food, laundry, etc) that appealed to students.
I myself ended up joining Google when my academic path was interrupted, despite thinking I'd never do that. Google employees were already complaining in the early 2010s about the changing culture, but there was still enough of it left, and by all accounts, early Google was a magical place.
I'm not sure how much of it is Google and how much is just a broader collection of SV companies, but engineering salaries, including software, in general were much more conventional professional salaries until at least the dot-com era. I started with a computer company for about $40K in the mid-80s (with a grad degree) so a bit over $100K today with nothing special with respect to other benefits.
It's clearly more complicated than this, as people are pointing out, but I think your point is directionally true, and worth making. Maybe somebody else would have raised the bar, maybe the bar wasn't raised as high as was claimed, maybe they even raised the wrong bar. But, Google did pressure many other employers to change in a generally positive direction, so I'd give them that.
Analogously: I'm not a fan of Starbucks coffee, but I recognize that (where I live) specialty coffee places mostly did not even exist before SBUX popularized the idea that coffee didn't have to come out of a #10 can. You can raise the level of competition while not being the best yourself.
Hmm, I still fail to realize that, as except flexible work hours, none of this is matching my experience as a software engineer. I live in Europe though.
It's not that I complain of my situation: I'm healthy, have a loving family, and work with a great team which is full of kindness and which is part of an international group, something that let me exchange with people from all around the world as part of my job in a full remote position.
So this is just to say that not all SE live in this ultra-privileged bubble. :)
You really need to read some mid-90's books like Microserfs or some of the early Mac histories for some historical context. None of this was new or particularly unusual in the valley at the time.
Most of what Google did was copying other companies, like Genentech (I've worked at both, twice). It's almost as if Google got a list from Genentech and then just added 25% to everything. There were a few benefits that I haven't seen anywhere else, such as the death benefit, which led me to joke that I was worth more dead than alive.
> sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day
Most of us never have and never will. This hasn't become the standard just a perk for a small subsection of mostly American FANNG employees.
As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.
> People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds.
Two comments:
1. They wanted to encourage people to work later
2. Where the f%%% was all that stuff when I was at AWS /s
I did work remotely the entire time I was there (my department didn’t have an RTO mandate). But I did travel to corporate offices in DC, Nashville, Dallas, Seattle and San Francisco after Covid lifted and I was…disappointed.
By 1998 many of the things you mentioned where common in Silicon Valley. So, Google was hardly the first company to pay very well or have great perks.
Historically a huge range of perks have been tossed around including some that have gone away like company cars due to tax code changes that eliminated the benefits. There’s long been ebb and flow around what perks are common, and which ones stick around as the company grows.
One that I wish caught on was Microsoft being rather famous for offering engineers an actual office with doors that closed.
I seem to recall that at one point Microsoft guaranteed to match Google's offers, because Google had clearly figured out how to hire the best engineers.
> the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day
Just a reminder that outside of SV/FAANG (so, 99% of devs?) all of that is not even close to be a reality.
I partially agree; they did make a big splash with all of those benefits, but also Google excludes 54% of their workforce (TVCs) from these benefits. Its a bit of a stretch to say tech workers owe Google for these benefits at other companies. To me, they're a shrewd US corporation (not that there is anything particularly wrong with that) where I don't see a lot of "goodness".
The spoiling was already quite obscene during the Dotcom Bubble 1996-00. IPO valuations were directly related to the number of programmers in a company, so they did everything to hire and retain staff.
Google is a great example of "it's difficult to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on not understanding it".
Even before google was founded and the founders discussed how they could monetize their search, they understood that paid ads create a conflict of interest: the point of search which is to to return the most relevant results, but the incentive in paid ads is to return the best paying ads. One of their papers contains this point _in writing_.
However, every single time I pointed this out to a person working at google they immediately jump into Olympic level acrobatics to explain why the two things are not in conflict. I especially enjoy hearing the argument that in a free market the most relevant advertiser also happens be the one who can afford to pay the most. I've never worked at Google, but I would bet that part of their induction is to train their employees how to combat these ideas.
What's also incredible about early Google is how FAST the company created unique technology that led to decades-long profits.
The company IPO'd in August 2004, less than 6 years after it was founded. I think the market cap was around $20 B then, and now it's in the trillions.
I don't think any other company since has done it that fast -- Stripe, Uber, AirBNB, Dropbox, etc.
Compare Facebook, a company that also grew quickly. It was founded in 2004 and IPO'd in 2012, so more like 8 years.
And not just IPO'd, but created BOTH interesting tech and product. Back in those days I loved using Google -- it's a shame that most people don't remember that, and don't have the chance to experience it.
People would say the same things about Google that they say today about generative AI -- I remember an acquaintance wrote a blog post "Is Google God?"
Also, if you compare OpenAI, they're about ~8 years in now, and obviously have done more than 99.9% of organizations in 8 years. But they're also not fantastically profitable, and there's a big "research preview" disclaimer below their main product.
...
I joined Google less than 7 years in, right after the IPO, and it was already a smoothly running machine. It already had 3,000 employees and a bunch of offices, and good management.
I do think the IPO changed the company permanently. There was a bunch of turnover around that time. I remember Wayne Rosing, the VP of engineering, left shortly after I joined. I maintained/rewrote tools written by early employees, and I'm sure they were all (rightfully) taking a victory lap, at least in their minds ...
Definitely sad to see the hollowing out of all that talent in the last ~10 years. I think the founders just weren't prepared for how big it would become, and the company got beyond them.
When Google later went public in 2004, Larry, Sergey, and Eric made a pact to work together on Google for the following 20 years. That's coming due soon in 2024.
About a year before, in mid-1997, word got around that there was this cool new search engine project that was giving great results. You could get to it only from the Berkeley and Stanford campuses at http://google.stanford.edu
Berkeley and Stanford, despite their sports rivalry, actually work together a lot and at the time had direct connect networks between the two schools (which also made file sharing across dorms at both campuses a lot easier!), which was the only reason we could access it.
We all quickly switched to using it because it gave far better results than the best alternative at the time, AltaVista.
Anyone else remember how much better Google was at the beginning than anything else?
I had always tried the latest search engines like Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. Once Google came around they all looked like total crap, it was simply a revolution. The clean interface, the performance, the much better results, it was beautiful.
I do remember. Everything else looked like a directory rather than a search engine. And it wasn't just better, it was way faster too. It felt like magic.
This is basically happen with almost every SaaS. They start with clean interface, performance while being used-friendly running by burning VC money to capture market. Then end up being user hostile products that locked in users to milk them before alternative come out.
Chromium/ChromiumOS and AOSP are some of the most valuable open source projects on earth. Without android, smartphones would be a luxury, thanks to android even poor people have one, in many cases their only general purpose computing device.
And 25 years in they more or less control the whole internet. With WEI they will be able to decide who is allowed to use the web, and with what software. It was good while it lasted.
If you think the world deserves some more innovation in the search space, email me at [email protected] - we have a team (mostly ex-Meta/Twitter/Insta), an MVP, and early revenue.
It's certainly been interesting watching my opinion of Google change over the years from great to awful. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy, being over twice as old as Google. :)
Lot of messages in that that picture. Elements of simplicity, couple ordinary people rolling up their sleeves and saying why not them, classic American dream. Attire is also interesting, I think more for them to feel like they are at work and not hanging around a friends garage.
If you've ever had to wake up in the morning and set your own direction, you'll appreciate the picture.
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-Google.
[+] [-] whack|2 years ago|reply
A big reason why silicon valley comp rose so much in the last decade was because major companies were previously colluding to suppress worker wages. And yes, this includes Google. It ended in 2009, and that's when tech compensation really exploded. See link at bottom.
If anything I would give Facebook far more credit. They were willing to pay more than any other major tech company. And more importantly, they also refused to participate in the aforementioned cartel, which resulted in a ton of poaching atcivity which drove up market wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[+] [-] ppsreejith|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-r...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227388 - Steve jobs email asking Google to stop poaching from apple and them agreeing
[+] [-] drewg123|2 years ago|reply
I left Google for Netflix mostly because of my inability to work remotely for Google, and the group I work for in Netflix being remote friendly.
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
Were you working in the Valley? Because a decade before Google I co-founded a company and while we didn't have in house chefs (we were a bootstrap) we had the rest. And not because we were special -- the three of us who co-founded the company were used to those things from our own prior employers.
[+] [-] listmaking|2 years ago|reply
Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the highest ideal, I remember hearing the opinion that if you can't get a tenure-track job, Google is a pretty good second choice because it's “just like a university”: you had (so the story went) freedom to do whatever you wanted, smart peers, “talks at Google” from the best speakers, … and there were perks (free food, laundry, etc) that appealed to students.
I myself ended up joining Google when my academic path was interrupted, despite thinking I'd never do that. Google employees were already complaining in the early 2010s about the changing culture, but there was still enough of it left, and by all accounts, early Google was a magical place.
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
Analogously: I'm not a fan of Starbucks coffee, but I recognize that (where I live) specialty coffee places mostly did not even exist before SBUX popularized the idea that coffee didn't have to come out of a #10 can. You can raise the level of competition while not being the best yourself.
[+] [-] psychoslave|2 years ago|reply
It's not that I complain of my situation: I'm healthy, have a loving family, and work with a great team which is full of kindness and which is part of an international group, something that let me exchange with people from all around the world as part of my job in a full remote position.
So this is just to say that not all SE live in this ultra-privileged bubble. :)
[+] [-] KerrAvon|2 years ago|reply
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs.
[+] [-] shortrounddev2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmpz22|2 years ago|reply
Most of us never have and never will. This hasn't become the standard just a perk for a small subsection of mostly American FANNG employees.
[+] [-] nugget|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface_74|2 years ago|reply
Two comments:
1. They wanted to encourage people to work later
2. Where the f%%% was all that stuff when I was at AWS /s
I did work remotely the entire time I was there (my department didn’t have an RTO mandate). But I did travel to corporate offices in DC, Nashville, Dallas, Seattle and San Francisco after Covid lifted and I was…disappointed.
[+] [-] russ|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|2 years ago|reply
Historically a huge range of perks have been tossed around including some that have gone away like company cars due to tax code changes that eliminated the benefits. There’s long been ebb and flow around what perks are common, and which ones stick around as the company grows.
One that I wish caught on was Microsoft being rather famous for offering engineers an actual office with doors that closed.
[+] [-] paulddraper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xenoamorphous|2 years ago|reply
Just a reminder that outside of SV/FAANG (so, 99% of devs?) all of that is not even close to be a reality.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] biogene|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k2xl|2 years ago|reply
This showed the crazy perks before Google became the powerhouse.
[+] [-] EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rr808|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilyevsky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnalbertearle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
Also didn’t Google engage in a wage fixing cartel?
[+] [-] johnalbertearle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhp123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drt5b7j|2 years ago|reply
Even before google was founded and the founders discussed how they could monetize their search, they understood that paid ads create a conflict of interest: the point of search which is to to return the most relevant results, but the incentive in paid ads is to return the best paying ads. One of their papers contains this point _in writing_.
However, every single time I pointed this out to a person working at google they immediately jump into Olympic level acrobatics to explain why the two things are not in conflict. I especially enjoy hearing the argument that in a free market the most relevant advertiser also happens be the one who can afford to pay the most. I've never worked at Google, but I would bet that part of their induction is to train their employees how to combat these ideas.
Anyway big picture google isn't one of the worst.
[+] [-] chubot|2 years ago|reply
The company IPO'd in August 2004, less than 6 years after it was founded. I think the market cap was around $20 B then, and now it's in the trillions.
I don't think any other company since has done it that fast -- Stripe, Uber, AirBNB, Dropbox, etc.
Compare Facebook, a company that also grew quickly. It was founded in 2004 and IPO'd in 2012, so more like 8 years.
And not just IPO'd, but created BOTH interesting tech and product. Back in those days I loved using Google -- it's a shame that most people don't remember that, and don't have the chance to experience it.
People would say the same things about Google that they say today about generative AI -- I remember an acquaintance wrote a blog post "Is Google God?"
Also, if you compare OpenAI, they're about ~8 years in now, and obviously have done more than 99.9% of organizations in 8 years. But they're also not fantastically profitable, and there's a big "research preview" disclaimer below their main product.
...
I joined Google less than 7 years in, right after the IPO, and it was already a smoothly running machine. It already had 3,000 employees and a bunch of offices, and good management.
I do think the IPO changed the company permanently. There was a bunch of turnover around that time. I remember Wayne Rosing, the VP of engineering, left shortly after I joined. I maintained/rewrote tools written by early employees, and I'm sure they were all (rightfully) taking a victory lap, at least in their minds ...
Definitely sad to see the hollowing out of all that talent in the last ~10 years. I think the founders just weren't prepared for how big it would become, and the company got beyond them.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|2 years ago|reply
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
[+] [-] greyface-|2 years ago|reply
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|2 years ago|reply
I realise this question somewhat requires defining what Google is and it's current size and scale, which is quite the challenge.
To me Google seems uniquely impactful, uniquely quickly, but I'd love to learn of other comparable companies from history.
[+] [-] ctoth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|2 years ago|reply
Berkeley and Stanford, despite their sports rivalry, actually work together a lot and at the time had direct connect networks between the two schools (which also made file sharing across dorms at both campuses a lot easier!), which was the only reason we could access it.
We all quickly switched to using it because it gave far better results than the best alternative at the time, AltaVista.
[+] [-] eloisant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|2 years ago|reply
I had always tried the latest search engines like Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. Once Google came around they all looked like total crap, it was simply a revolution. The clean interface, the performance, the much better results, it was beautiful.
[+] [-] elorant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SXX|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diederich|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooreds|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Josh613|2 years ago|reply
If you think the world deserves some more innovation in the search space, email me at [email protected] - we have a team (mostly ex-Meta/Twitter/Insta), an MVP, and early revenue.
[+] [-] beej71|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xkcd1963|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmezzetti|2 years ago|reply
If you've ever had to wake up in the morning and set your own direction, you'll appreciate the picture.