[varelse]

Vic Gundotra ruined Google+, which could have and should have relegated Facebook to 2nd place, but then Real Names happened and the rest is history.

Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them.

Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases.

That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.

[wdr1]

> Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Tveit_Alvestrand

[varelse]

Yes, Google hires specialists for their moonshots. And in doing so they make it extra difficult for existing employees to escape the tedious work they're doing by transferring to them. As an example, when I worked there, I was told (by someone on Glass) that the only real way on to the Android team was to be hired into it from outside.

Using these black swans to disprove my point seems akin to "proving" that playing the stock market is easy because Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch got really rich doing so.

So are you actually unaware of the blind allocation process at Google for most incoming employees or are you just trolling me?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713320

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713077

[jrockway]

I had no trouble transferring from Checkout to Fiber, and Fiber is a pretty cool project. I also know people on my team that transferred to Glass.

Anything is possible, you just have to do it. Nobody is going to come up to you and say, "hey, I read your mind and I think you want to transfer to Android. Follow me." Just do it!