Dear Google Developer or person thinking about trying to join Google,
Your job is not entrepreneurial. I hate hearing the line – “Google is so entrepreneurial, its like a startup!”.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about money and resources. If you work at Google, you do not.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about awareness and marketing and doing it affordably and on a budget. Tech blogs broadcast every word from the mouth of Google.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about culture, they can’t just hire a bunch of hyper-rational introverts with no friends, who are massively arrogant about their math skills…and cookie cutter follower zombies in the world of technology.
Real entrepreneurs have to buy their own lunch. They don’t get fat off of morning Googley donuts.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about profitability and making customers happy, they can’t just invade the privacy of all their customers and launch buzz on them.
Honestly, for the life of me, I can’t fathom why a developer would go take a job at Google. Its like being an awesome carpenter and saying “I want to go work at Ikea” so I can churn out follower products like an open-source mobile OS 5 years after Symbian or web-based email 10 years after Hotmail or a webOS 3 years after Palm did it. Way to gooooo, you are such wonderful innovators, you are applying the Microsoft method of “do it several years after everybody else”. I’m sure they haven’t been burned by that, and I’m sure you won’t either.
Anyways, all this to say, if you want to try to do things differently, if you want actual, real entrepreneurial experience and a real start-up job… we need a killer dev at Peek. I dare you to get up off your comfy Googly job and email me dan at getpeek. You will work on some of the coolest tech in the business. We believe the fat world of HTML & javascript isn’t right for mobile, we want to make OSs, protocols, devices and apps that can be used across the whole world, not just by upper-middle class westerners who have broad 3G deployments and money to buy $400 devices.
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krauser530 | 21-Jul-10 at 8:58 pm | Permalink
Geez, why all the Google hate? They may not do things first, but they definitely have products that are useful and easy to use. Peek wasn’t the first to offer mobile e-mail, but you guys built a useful and easy to use product. Not to mention Google’s GMail service sits right at the heart of a lot of what you do. The company has it’s problems, but they’re doing pretty well for their size.
Jürgen | 21-Jul-10 at 11:18 pm | Permalink
In Dan’s text Google is a metaphor and it’s not a particular attack on GOOGLE or IKEA. It is about entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately and probably due to some bad experience from the dot com bubble times, a lot of IT people are not entrepreneurial anymore, they like to have stable jobs and accept more or less boring standard work without major risks…
That type of entrepreneurial IT staff Dan is looking for, has become rare …
dan | 22-Jul-10 at 7:04 am | Permalink
Jurgen, definitely… and specifically Google puts a facade up to their young, new developers telling them they are entrepreneurial, which irks me.
I actually think if you live in Silicon Valley that you still see the entrepreneurial attitude in developers. Elsewhere, definitely not.
Adam Conrad | 22-Jul-10 at 10:30 am | Permalink
Actually Dan, I would say it’s just as strong in Boston
Ben | 22-Jul-10 at 12:03 pm | Permalink
Being a cabinetmaker (carpenters make buildings, not furniture…) and a developer I can see the appeal of working at IKEA or google: Work with smart people, have a lot of resources to deal with frustrating aspects of the craft, and have your work used and appreciated by millions.
The comparison to IKEA is actually probably apt in the opposite way you intended: the problems being solved by engineers at IKEA is not how to make one cabinet, but how to make a cabinet that can be mass produced, flat-packed, and more easily assembled by anyone. In the same way, Googlers are often solving not the problem of inventing something totally new, but inventing a scalable way of providing a service that exists in some form so that orders of magnitude more people can use it.
And free food makes everyone happier. We’re just monkeys grinning when someone hands us a banana.
Evan Kaufman | 22-Jul-10 at 1:49 pm | Permalink
The google approach to things is never to “do it first,” but to “do it right.”
I agree that Google is not a startup, which is why they can do the things that they do. They provide the most popular web-based free email service (Gmail), the most popular map and directions service (Google Maps), the most popular open source phone OS (Android), et al. It’s because they’re not a startup and they have vast amounts of funding and talent that they can afford to do these things and do them for free, and to put so much of their weight behind it.
Do I like everything they do? No. I don’t use Chrome, or Google Earth. I also don’t use an iPhone even though I have a high level of respect for Apple and their products as well.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you have an axe to grind rather than that you’re trying to make a valid point.
dan | 22-Jul-10 at 2:04 pm | Permalink
I really have no particular axe to grind with “Google”.
Its more with the brainless decisions of top graduates and talented developers to flock to Google/Facebook instead of taking the entrepreneurial leap… or just doing something different period. One of the big reasons is this perception of “innovation, entrepreneurial, not big company”… which is what I am flaming on.
dan | 22-Jul-10 at 2:12 pm | Permalink
Actually I rescind that comment… I’m sure I can come up with many reasons to hate on Google:
-they are directly responsible for making the internet a giant spam-iverse… I can’t read anything anymore without google adsense being everywhere
-they are destroying mobile. GSM is arguably the most successful technology EVER. GSM is super duper reliable, very light on protocol overhead (yeah SS7) and affordable. It can be deployed in any country in the world, and everybody can afford a phone. The Google view of data is directly counter to that – Not Reliable, Fat Protocols, Fat Usage of the Network, running Java on a device so you need at least 1000Mhz so the phone costs 4x more than 80% of the world can afford.
-and they get a free ride from everybody. They are always viewed as “not evil”. Well I think spam and forcing the internet away from “pay for content” to an “ad-based model” was inherently evil. Of course, the only person who agrees with me on this one is Rupert Murdoch
Jürgen | 22-Jul-10 at 2:34 pm | Permalink
@Evan:
Dan used Google as a symbol, in his essay. Google is even a good symbol for not being entrepreneurial in my option, not any more. Because they have almost unlimited funding now and what they are doing is not quite immediately threating their existence. Look on the recent scandal around Google Earth / Streetview in Europe. A startup can not afford such kind of trouble.
I agree with the basic idea, that if working in or for a startup you have to think much more about the next steps, new functions or better implementations, new ideas and customer expectations. And to be able to do or achieve this, you need to be special … and after some time in a company like Google, these special abilities are slowly dissoluting – when big ideas and entrepreneurship slowly becomes management and creativity is being lost.
I could agree that Google still is offering a much more entrepreneurial environment than e.g. Big Blue. But compared to startups like PEEK, in the best case they still accept entrepreneurial ideas from their staff and manage them, but for being entrepreneurs they lack all the risks and challenges …
_
@Ben:
IKEA has gone exactly the way from entrepreneurship to management – to design a new cupboard or whatever is a very solvable and tiny technical problem, but running IKEA is a management task done by managers, not entrepreneurs. The work they offer might be appealing, but you’re pushed into management processes with limits, what is limiting your creativity…
_
In short, I think Dan with PEEK looks for people who are squeezed with big comfort into management boxes and can’t realize anymore, that with a level of uncertainty they could be more creative and productive with more fun …
Jürgen | 22-Jul-10 at 2:38 pm | Permalink
@ DAN:
About GSM – don’t forget that a lot of of the IT backbone of GSM system apart from the radio interface even has gone open source. There already were some public tests of open source GSM systems with more or less old radio interfaces.
And, GSM is a very good example for the success of worldwide standards …