[listmaking]

> a Disneyland for nerds

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.

[dekhn]

I joined google after self-interrupting my academic path. Later I realized that Matt Welsh was the guy who wrote the first Linux manual I ever had (https://www.mdw.la/papers/linux-getting-started.pdf) which was pretty much the gateway for me learning what I needed to to work at Google.

My goal in joining google was to treat it as academia and use my position there to return to a stronger position in academia. I didn't manage to do this, but I was a more productive researcher as a SWE at Google than I ever was working in academia.

For a while Google wasn't just disneyland for nerds- it was nerdtopia. It was the first place I worked that had more people who were more nerdy than me. At first that was great but eventually it got tiresome.

[shepherdjerred]

Do any companies today still have this culture?

[dekhn]

R&D in pharma/biotech can be like this. But there are fewer and fewer free-wheeling R&D groups in industry these days, probably because people saw Xerox PARC and thought it was a waste of money (a single invention at PARC paid for all of PARC).

[VirusNewbie]

I recently joined and was shocked how much freedom they give senior engineers. It's really different than most big companies.

[jedberg]

OpenAI seems like it from the outside.