i think that it was probably a bad sign when the amount of shockingly weird behavior i saw at Google declined to almost zero
Replies
otoh, i was glad to see people stop drinking hard liquor at their desks and much more hostility to harassment
sep 1, 2025, 5:18 am • 51 0 • view
there were tequila shots at my first Social weekly event. it was a Thursday at 4 PM!
sep 1, 2025, 5:20 am • 54 0 • view
I had one experience with a company that stocked beer in the fridge and now I am a Hard No on that “perk”
sep 1, 2025, 5:22 am • 32 0 • view
im thinking more of the steiner type, having drinks at the end of a day is more normal
sep 1, 2025, 5:21 am • 8 0 • view
listen other than the harassment this just sounds like a golden era
sep 1, 2025, 5:23 am • 10 0 • view
Yeah I wish it was cool to crack open a drink at 4 or 5 and loosen up with your colleagues as you finish your work, but experience suggests it never works out that way (and the fridge starts opening earlier… and earlier… and earlier…)
sep 1, 2025, 5:29 am • 5 0 • view
civilization-style game about running a software company
sep 1, 2025, 5:23 am • 17 2 • view
Game dev story
sep 1, 2025, 11:56 am • 1 0 • view
oh yeah lol we probably should have turned off his dogfood access when he went to Facebook
sep 1, 2025, 5:23 am • 5 0 • view
there was a very clear "asshole director leaves Google to Meta" pipeline. but I also know reasonable people who somehow are ok at meta
sep 1, 2025, 5:24 am • 4 0 • view
bsky.app/profile/theo...
sep 1, 2025, 5:19 am • 4 0 • view
is this how we got material ui
sep 1, 2025, 7:50 am • 1 0 • view
The balance between allowing genuinely weird behavior and allowing the Andy Rubin's of the world to sexually blackmail their employees into BDSM is a challenge (not that boring corporations are good at preventing sexual harassment and abuse)
sep 1, 2025, 5:45 pm • 16 1 • view
They’re all cops now, the point of Big Tech is to maintain a particular order of things
sep 1, 2025, 5:17 am • 9 1 • view
Just say technocratic fascism
sep 1, 2025, 11:34 am • 0 0 • view
They're the same picture.
sep 1, 2025, 12:15 pm • 0 0 • view
wow Google was so very much less weird than the late 90s SF startup world. My boss’s chained torso was on the cover of the sfbg’s Folsom edition. There were happy hours, but not with alcohol. Someone handed me a copy of The Ethical Slut in the stairwell and said I think you should read this.
sep 1, 2025, 5:26 am • 22 0 • view
“Hooking up with someone at a party and then being interviewed by their spouse for a job” was… well, I don’t know if _common_ was the word but it definitely happened to me and more than one person I knew. (Both lovely people for the record; I turned the job down because I didn’t want to move.)
sep 1, 2025, 5:05 pm • 12 1 • view
i don't mean asshole behavior -- although that also declined -- but things like "guy who absolutely will not work from his desk for reasons which are never expressed" or "person with a link with nine paragraphs on how to interact with them" or "guy gets in a fight with a senior director on listserv"
sep 1, 2025, 5:16 am • 248 3 • view
this is very "unmasked autism" coded some of those very same people might still have remained but learned how to mask and became manager types ✋
sep 1, 2025, 5:23 am • 50 0 • view
there used to be people at Google I truly couldn't figure out how to interact with I could have a hour long meeting with someone and while I could parse what they said I couldn't get the semantics Or folks who self identify in ways I didn't understand and didn't feel comfortable asking Was cool
sep 1, 2025, 5:28 am • 41 0 • view
Ya when I first joined there was guys that didn't wear shoes except to go in the cafe. When's the last time you saw one of them around
sep 1, 2025, 7:04 am • 17 0 • view
oh lol you worked with shit... i forget his name. last name was Lilot, I think?
sep 1, 2025, 4:55 pm • 8 0 • view
Nope, different guy
sep 1, 2025, 6:25 pm • 0 0 • view
jean-something lilot. worked for the G+ backend team and got promoted faster than anyone other than David Fiala, whom we bought an old "I have root @ Google" t-shirt because he kept finding exploits which could potentially give him root.
sep 1, 2025, 4:58 pm • 16 0 • view
jean-christophe lilot.
sep 1, 2025, 4:59 pm • 7 0 • view
Feel like it's across tech. As it becomes more mature the rough edges have gotten sanded off the developers as well as the products, and as annoying as they can be, those rough bits were where some of the most interesting shit comes. Then again, nostalgia colors everything.
sep 1, 2025, 5:51 am • 10 0 • view
Then again, places like Sun were always pretty uptight so maybe it was just Google managed to keep startup level weirdness for longer than most.
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 am • 8 0 • view
I think there was a always big split between old tech (Sun, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft etc) from earlier and the later starters like Google and many 90s/00s startups
sep 1, 2025, 12:02 pm • 3 0 • view
Guy so paranoid about having his picture taken that on entering a meeting room he puts a Post-It note over the camera. The guy who got so angry while asking the CEO a question about the employee handbook that he quit on the spot was like the week before I started.
sep 1, 2025, 12:37 pm • 5 0 • view
It was always "guy", wasn't it :) I worked for a Google subsidiary around that time, and I don't remember such people fondly. They were usually a pain to work with.
sep 1, 2025, 1:49 pm • 2 0 • view
not always! c.f., Justine Tunney, or purple@, or Batman (they/them plural), or mmitchell, any number of other people.
sep 1, 2025, 4:56 pm • 7 0 • view
Mitchell was all right :)
sep 1, 2025, 5:03 pm • 1 0 • view
i like meg a lot! but her backstory is fascinating!
sep 1, 2025, 5:38 pm • 1 0 • view
It has in fact basically become the exact thing the founders swore it would never be ("a conventional company") and it makes me sad Even when I first joined in 2015 it was on its way but man, the difference between like 2018 and 2022 or 2023
sep 1, 2025, 5:28 am • 44 0 • view
by late 2018, when memegen takedown demands were routine and petition starters were starting to face retaliation, it was clear the party was over
sep 1, 2025, 5:52 am • 18 0 • view
Part of that was very clearly ZIRP, but also I think the employee backlash against Project Maven triggered a management backlash against employee activism.
sep 1, 2025, 11:59 am • 13 0 • view
When interest rates are 0, you can be picky at what customers you'll work for. When they're 4%, you can't be that picky, the capital demands return.
sep 1, 2025, 12:00 pm • 10 0 • view
you gotta have some (non-abusive) weirdos and some tolerance to (non-abusive) weirdos
sep 1, 2025, 5:19 am • 83 0 • view
load-bearing thatguy
sep 1, 2025, 5:29 am • 29 0 • view
Mature organization (derogatory)
sep 1, 2025, 5:16 am • 74 0 • view
business degrees ruin it all. we went from three different flavors of creamer to downgrading to a bulk commercial powder that has no flavor.
sep 1, 2025, 5:19 am • 16 1 • view
im really enjoying this book. unfortunately it is very thorough and factual, ergo extremely depressing
sep 1, 2025, 6:34 am • 12 0 • view
my wife sent me a video about the guy at Google New York who custom built a folding boat that he can tow behind his folding bike to cut his commute. Problem solver who doesn’t care if people thinks his solutions are weird.
sep 1, 2025, 11:36 am • 8 0 • view
Can’t believe you just drop this as a tease…
sep 1, 2025, 5:39 pm • 0 0 • view
Its probably available elsewhere, but we saw it on instagram www.instagram.com/reel/DM3VMsE...
sep 1, 2025, 11:52 pm • 2 0 • view
Thank you! That was highly enjoyable content
sep 2, 2025, 12:36 am • 1 0 • view
I think where it all went wrong is when people stopped wearing vibram five fingers to lunch. Used to see that all the time.
sep 1, 2025, 6:50 am • 8 0 • view
But more seriously the thing I found weirdest was that people would stand up at TGIF and absolutely tear into senior execs for policies that struck me as pretty minor and ok (like real names). Obviously in hindsight that was probably some sort of bulwark against providing killer AI to the IDF, etc.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 am • 13 0 • view
Many of those people are still around, but they execs wised up and made it impossible to yell at them
sep 1, 2025, 7:44 am • 8 0 • view
Yeah, definitely. The most pro-worker thing Google ever did was allow employees to create employee-to-employee communications channels inside the company--but if the company owns them, the company can control them.
sep 1, 2025, 7:47 am • 6 0 • view
Companies who say they are like a family have never witnessed a domestic dispute
sep 1, 2025, 2:37 pm • 1 0 • view
Where's the fucking whimsy?
sep 1, 2025, 2:33 pm • 0 0 • view
We were just having an Michael O. Church nostalgia fest the other day! I had to explain to my wife what it meant about you that you were willing to confess to having sock puppets on Wikipedia. "Definitely T9 Visionary Behavior."
sep 1, 2025, 5:19 am • 21 0 • view
now *that's* a name I haven't heard in a while. probably for the best
sep 1, 2025, 11:42 am • 1 0 • view
He still has sock puppets on Quora periodically asking why such an upstanding person was banned by Them.
sep 1, 2025, 5:27 am • 11 0 • view
Who is this may I ask?
sep 2, 2025, 1:47 am • 0 0 • view
I have heard the Michael O Church Google saga in great detail from people who were there and I think one of the funniest crossovers was the time Scott Alexander extensively cited his writing on social class hierarchies
sep 1, 2025, 4:57 pm • 4 0 • view
omg citation needed
sep 1, 2025, 5:15 pm • 1 0 • view
No longer a growth company. Google is now a pure dividend stock.
sep 1, 2025, 5:17 am • 13 0 • view
You may be underselling the infrastructure advantage they have. They aren’t absolutely reliant on NVIDIA the way the other foundation model providers are.
sep 1, 2025, 5:19 am • 8 0 • view
I have no real strong opinions on Google stock and imagine they still have room to grow. I was just making a joke that if they aren't hiring very proficient weirdos and are instead hiring the most bureaucratically safe candidates, then they are probably becoming a more mature company.
sep 1, 2025, 5:22 am • 15 0 • view
it's not even much of a dividend!
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 am • 2 0 • view