[jrhouston]

I like how it starts out as quirky jokes about tech minutiae and slowly mutates into bitter social criticism directed at the company and its leadership, presumably as the old systems of power crept in and eroded the idealism that was present when they joined the company.

[raxxorrax]

Heh, it certainly visualized his decline in hope very well. Google was a cool company once and some of its products and tech still are, but you simply have to manage your expectations when a companies goes public. It stops belonging to the people working there.

Also, companies have proven to be inept to tackle social problems, even if they genuinely wanted to.

[shadowgovt]

For me, the beginning of the end of my enchantment with the company was when one of the founders responded to a major internal scandal at TGIF with the thought that he didn't want to deal with this distraction; he just wanted to make cool things.

And my internal response was "Friend, you manage a ten-thousand-person company. Garage tinkerers have the luxury of their job being 'make cool things.' Your job is people."

[allenu]

I would love if it was possible to just track general industry sentiment over the same time period. As someone who was working at another big tech company nearly over the same duration he was at Google, I myself noticed it became "less fun and exciting" to be in tech within that large company. However, some of that is undoubtedly just a part of getting older and becoming less naive about the world.