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makeset | 4 months ago

Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."

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nickdothutton|4 months ago

In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.

walthamstow|4 months ago

Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?

adam_hn|4 months ago

You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.

stillworks|4 months ago

His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.

cudgy|4 months ago

Ageism?

prewett|4 months ago

He might not have been an engineer.

Imustaskforhelp|4 months ago

One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly.

You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.

WD-42|4 months ago

Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…

makeset|4 months ago

Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"

mschuster91|4 months ago

I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.

Croak|4 months ago

I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s.

Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.

sofixa|4 months ago

> IBM

Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.

Avalaxy|4 months ago

That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.

hnlmorg|4 months ago

That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too.

For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.

Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.

op00to|4 months ago

IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.