Many of these are very recent departures, eg. Craig Silverstein left in Feb 2012, Amit Patel was within the last year or two, Marissa was last week. I'm kinda amazed that half of the first 20 employees had 10+ year careers there, despite being financially independent since the IPO. I read somewhere that median Silicon Valley job tenure is about 2-3 years.
The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming "old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were. At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round. From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing out the same way.
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.
Tenures are not 2-3 years when you're financially independent. When you have an epic trump card in all conversations about what you should spend your time on, do you think you'd spend more than a minute doing something you didn't want to?
I believe the term is "fuck-you money".
"""
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators.
"""
Entirely different loyalty, maybe even belief in the long term. I would say that the difference between the two companies is that Facebook hired young, while Google hired older, highly educated employees.
(In the list below, I wouldn't even count Steve Chen, he was from Paypal and spent no time at Facebook).
Yes, and that is a great thing. When journalism was the old school "I get a few bits of info and use it to decorate a short article with my uninformed opinion about random topics I have nothing to do with", it was worse. Each time I had an insider knowledge of the topic, I was horrified by how biased, approximate, reductive, or plain wrong journalism was.
I also have direct reports (my wife) of journalists asking questions in the streets to many people until they got the answer they were looking for. I bet it is common practice: you are not only told to write a piece about X, you are also implicitly told what to write and you just bend your material, data or street interview or whatnot, in the direction that will get the more emotional reaction from the reader.
Disc: I'm talking about French journalism here, maybe US journalism or Eskimo journalism is magically much better, I don't know.
For non-anonymous answers, they ask the writer before publishing. I was just published on there, and got a Quora message asking for my permission. Not sure how they handle anonymous answers.
[+] [-] nostrademons|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.
[+] [-] codemac|13 years ago|reply
I believe the term is "fuck-you money".
""" This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. """
[+] [-] joshAg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssx|13 years ago|reply
Entirely different loyalty, maybe even belief in the long term. I would say that the difference between the two companies is that Facebook hired young, while Google hired older, highly educated employees.
(In the list below, I wouldn't even count Steve Chen, he was from Paypal and spent no time at Facebook).
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-first-20-employees-...
I think the
[+] [-] pocsav|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|13 years ago|reply
I also have direct reports (my wife) of journalists asking questions in the streets to many people until they got the answer they were looking for. I bet it is common practice: you are not only told to write a piece about X, you are also implicitly told what to write and you just bend your material, data or street interview or whatnot, in the direction that will get the more emotional reaction from the reader.
Disc: I'm talking about French journalism here, maybe US journalism or Eskimo journalism is magically much better, I don't know.
[+] [-] sadga|13 years ago|reply
(But yes, to your point, Forbes is not a "journalism" site.)
[+] [-] ericdykstra|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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