WOW -- some people are leaving GOOGLE to go BACK to Microsoft!

[Darren Dirt]

http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/603827.htm

Recently I've been bumping into more and more people who've either left Google to come to Microsoft or got offers from both companies and picked Microsoft over Google. I believe this is part of a larger trend especially since I've seen lots of people who left the company for "greener pastures" return in the past year (at least 8 people I know personally have rejoined). However in this blog post I'll stick to talking about people who've chosen Microsoft over Google.

Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.

This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly?On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken.

...in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. I asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent far more time at Google than I, and they didn't know either. I am not making this up!

...Also, yikes, is the future of search gonna be less-Google more-Microsoft? "...Semantic search takes it to the third level..."

[Thorin]

I just wanna say, the last paragraph in your quotation relates to the managers at Google, not to Google itself.  However, the way you present the quotation is misleading in that it appears to be referring to Google as a whole.

[Darren Dirt]

Sorry, I was just including interesting quotes from the linked article. The full context is in the article. I'm not a talking head on FoxNoise, I'm not intentionally trying to give an impression the opposite of objective reality.

[Mr. Analog]

Some interesting perspective from an actual Googler.

[Thorin]

Some interesting perspective from an actual Googler.

That link doesn't work for me.  The actual link in the message is

Code Select Expand

http://"http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=601887&cid=24038335"
When I strip the extra http and quotes, it redirects to www.w3c.org

Oh wait, it's redirecting because I'm copying/pasting from the address bar and the address bar already stripped out the second colon, so I'm trying to access http//tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=601887&cid=24038335, which Firefox 3 redirects to www.w3c.org.

[Melbosa]

Try this link: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=601887&cid=24038335

[Mr. Analog]

Fix'd

[Darren Dirt]

Some interesting perspective from an actual Googler.

rofl this says it all...

the entire thing is based on the comments of three people. One interviewed with Google and never worked there, the other two worked at Microsoft, tried Google and had a culture clash, and fled back to Microsoft.

Many slashdot readers might not reconize that it's a dupe since each article links to a different site (with near identical text) and no one bothers to RTFA.

Also, Paul Graham in 2005, on PR

Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is the reason they began blogging in the first place.

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.