[kbenson]

I think we can find less negative interpretations of those.

1. Google is full of vampires (garlic)

Garlic makes your breath stink. People may avoid you after heavy garlic consumption.

2. Datacenters are babies (babysit)

As a metaphor, it's definitely possible to do worse. The systems within the datacenter will need attention. Constantly. People are on call to handle these and other issues. There are many parallels to watching children. Which is why, as a metaphor, it works, at least from his point of view.

3. Information is owned by the world (world's information) even though it's scraped into a Google index which you can only get to by using Google.

What are you even trying to say here? I don't think Google would contradict that they take existing free information and present it to you. Their value-ad is that they make it easy to find what you are looking for, and organize it in interesting ways. That he sees Google as a marketing company that uses this ability to service ads is hardly controversial.

[squar1sm]

We can disagree. What I was trying to say with #3 is that it's just an index. You use the index by using Google. If you don't like the index, don't use Google. But they aren't stealing the world's data so ownership doesn't matter. They are indexing it and creating a new bit of information, they own that. You know what I mean? It's just an index and they respect ROBOTS.TXT just like other crawlers (but not all).

[kbenson]

I don't think we have a difference of opinion on what Google does, just on what chromatic was trying to communicate. I think he was implying that Google is a bit pretentious in their interviewing when it seemed to amount to a regular sysadmin job from his perspective. It appears what you took from it is an assertion that Google is somehow stealing data and locking it up, and that's a bad thing? I'm still not exactly sure what you took from his text on that subject, your reply seems to be justification of your position, not clarification on what exactly you interpreted and found worth rebutting.

That said, my take on his reply to your original comment is that he really interpreted it as a shit job. I'm not sure if that's just the work at the level they decided he fit at, or is par for the course, but I can see how someone who identified as a programmer may be put off by an interview where they ask "Is it a problem for you to be maintaining code but not writing it?"

[chromatic]

I think he was implying that Google is a bit pretentious in their interviewing when it seemed to amount to a regular sysadmin job from his perspective.

This, and my CV says system administrator exactly once, and that ended in 2000. Everything since then has been not system administration. To be pigeonholed into system administration because the mighty algorithm had decreed that the intersection of "Perl" and "system administration" on a CV meant "system administration" did not sit well with me.