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"
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 ✋
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
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
oh lol you worked with shit... i forget his name. last name was Lilot, I think?
Nope, different guy
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.
jean-christophe lilot.
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.
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.
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
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.
Guy who writes so much that people realize what he’s like and loses his job. I can think of two radically different examples (though both exhibiting the same kind of self-regard) but would be shocked if there weren’t several more.
Guy who calls Urs Holzle a Nazi in a company-wide mailing list, a move that our old manager called “suicide by cop.”
Guy who starts going off on how weird furries are and awkwardly realizes that his interlocutor is at least furry-adjacent.
Guy who supports DEI initiatives for race, religion, neurodiversity, and sexuality but draws the line at caste.
Guy who has three monitors tiled with dozens of editors showing different files in eight-point text, whose notebook is page after page of microscopic text in boxes covering every square millimeter, who explains that growing up in Siberia paper was hard to come by.
Guy too young to have ever bought a postage stamp who knows the players in Japan’s interservice rivalries in the late 1930s the way some guys know about the players in their rotisserie league teams.
Guy who commissioned Dale Chihuly to make a sculpture for her living room so that she could make jokes about breaking the glass ceiling.
Guy about to quit who took all 200+ people in his org to an offsite in Las Vegas without informing his VP that he was about to spend 3/4 of a million dollars on a farewell party.
Guy who staffed the org he ran with startlingly beautiful PMs.
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.
not always! c.f., Justine Tunney, or purple@, or Batman (they/them plural), or mmitchell, any number of other people.
Mitchell was all right :)
i like meg a lot! but her backstory is fascinating!
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
by late 2018, when memegen takedown demands were routine and petition starters were starting to face retaliation, it was clear the party was over
Part of that was very clearly ZIRP, but also I think the employee backlash against Project Maven triggered a management backlash against employee activism.
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.