5 ms·

Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwo

by makeset 11mo ago

Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."

mschuster91 11mo ago
I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
- Croak 11mo ago
  I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
  - Gormo 11mo ago
    Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
    - mastax 11mo ago
      "Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.
      - Gormo 11mo ago
        Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.
        mastax 11mo ago
        Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
        Gormo 11mo ago
        I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers. I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
    - balamatom 11mo ago
      >Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?
      - Gormo 11mo ago
  - chipsrafferty 11mo ago
    Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    >I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.
    - balamatom 11mo ago
      One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
        Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.
  - sousastep 11mo ago
    Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.
- Avalaxy 11mo ago
  That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.
  - mschuster91 11mo ago
    Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs. Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share? And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
- hnlmorg 11mo ago
  That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too. For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail. Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
  - cogman10 11mo ago
    HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.
    - xadhominemx 11mo ago
      That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
- sofixa 11mo ago
  > IBM Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
- op00to 11mo ago
  IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
adam_hn 11mo ago
You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.
- cudgy 11mo ago
  Ageism?
- stillworks 11mo ago
  His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.
  - chipsrafferty 11mo ago
    Being a driver is "living his life"?
    - DanielHB 11mo ago
      If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...
    - Apocryphon 11mo ago
      Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.
    - stillworks 11mo ago
      Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement. He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund. Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities. Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been. I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do. Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
nickdothutton 11mo ago
In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.
- walthamstow 11mo ago
  Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?
  - tim333 11mo ago
    They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)
- nharada 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
- giardini 11mo ago
  So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England? https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-institute-expansion-2025/ https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i... https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-five-billion-cloud-infrastructure-2025-03-17/ https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
- insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site. They're also privately held, which makes a difference. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical-campus-a-world-away-from-wall-street-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical... This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek. https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.epic.com/visiting/ https://www.epic.com/visiting/
Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly. You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…
- makeset 11mo ago
  Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"

by makeset 11mo ago

mschuster91 11mo ago

I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.

Croak 11mo ago
I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
- Gormo 11mo ago
  Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
  - mastax 11mo ago
    "Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.
    - Gormo 11mo ago
      Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.
      - mastax 11mo ago
        Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
        Gormo 11mo ago
        I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers. I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    >Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?
    - Gormo 11mo ago
- chipsrafferty 11mo ago
  Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
  >I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
      Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.
- sousastep 11mo ago
  Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.
Avalaxy 11mo ago
That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs. Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share? And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
hnlmorg 11mo ago
That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too. For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail. Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
- cogman10 11mo ago
  HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.
  - xadhominemx 11mo ago
    That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
sofixa 11mo ago
> IBM Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
op00to 11mo ago
IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.

adam_hn 11mo ago

You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.

cudgy 11mo ago
Ageism?
stillworks 11mo ago
His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.
- chipsrafferty 11mo ago
  Being a driver is "living his life"?
  - DanielHB 11mo ago
    If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...
  - Apocryphon 11mo ago
    Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.
  - stillworks 11mo ago
    Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement. He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund. Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities. Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been. I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do. Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.

nickdothutton 11mo ago

In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.

walthamstow 11mo ago
Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?
- tim333 11mo ago
  They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)
nharada 11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
giardini 11mo ago
So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England? https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-institute-expansion-2025/ https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i... https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-five-billion-cloud-infrastructure-2025-03-17/ https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
insane_dreamer 11mo ago
Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site. They're also privately held, which makes a difference. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical-campus-a-world-away-from-wall-street-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical... This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek. https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929 https://www.epic.com/visiting/ https://www.epic.com/visiting/

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago

One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly. You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.

WD-42 11mo ago
Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…
makeset 11mo ago
Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"