Google is indeed a tightly walled garden. Hackers & Founders has been holding events 4 or 5 miles away from Google headquarters in Mountain View for several years. And, out of their 25,000 employees. We only get a handful of engineers that show up. And when they arrive, they quickly realize that H&F involves having a beer or two and geeking out about startups. The Googlers often can't geek out because of heavy NDA's, and are very concerned about loose lips after having a beer or two. So, they often stop showing up.<p>I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information).<p>Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers & Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months. Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in (via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got buzzed in the door.<p>I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA.<p>So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire" meme attached to you.<p>Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3 years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.
"[Google's culture] has led to many innovations - from the search first homepage, to the NoSql movement, powering webmail by Ajax ..."<p>C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded.<p>Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage? Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.
This is not news. Google's got 20,000 employees. Statiscally, every day a non-famous googler leaves Google. And that post doesn't tell us anything about Google that we didn't already know.
Wow, who needs to justify leaving a job after 7 years? Good read though and the author's new business looks cool. Although I often repeat and work for the same bosses again, I have always tried to work no more than 1 to 3 years with a group/team/company. Now, with a large company like Google (similar in size to SAIC where I was for 20 years, off and on), switching teams/divisions, etc. helps mix up the work experience but still getting fresh jobs is simply a good life strategy. BTW, It is easy enough to maintain long term friendships even if you don't work with people anymore.
I've been following douweosinga's blog since before he joined Google, interesting to see he's moving on. Part 2 is a little more interesting than the first.<p>He linked to this, though, which I didn't know about, and seems at first glance to be very useful and neat: <a href="http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/</a>
Why do people bash so much about the company when they are leaving ? Is it they want to become famous all of sudden ? Why don't people accept that big companies won't be like the same company when it got started.
On a side note, Triposo looks pretty good. There are some problems with the wikipedia text sometimes being in the city's native language though. I'm not sure if maybe that's how the page was when you scraped it.