The Google Vortex

For a long time I referred to Google as the Programmer Black Hole: my favourite programmers get sucked in, and they never come out again. Moreover, the more of them that get sucked in, the more its gravitation increases, accelerating the pull on those that remain.

I've decided that this characterization isn't exactly fair. Sure, from our view in the outside world, that's obviously what's happening. But rather than all those programmers being compressed into a spatial singularity, they're actually emerging into a parallel universe on the other side. A universe where there is such a thing as a free lunch, threads don't make your programs crash, parallelism is easy, and you can have millions of customers but provide absolutely no tech support and somehow get away with it. A universe with self-driving cars, a legitimate alternative to C, a working distributed filesystem, and the entire Internet cached in RAM.

A universe where on average, each employee produced $425,450 in profit in 2010, after deducting their salary and all other expenses. (Or alternatively: $1.2 million in revenue.)

I don't much like the fact of the Google Vortex. It's very sad to me that there are now two programmer universes: the haves and the have-nots. More than half of the programmers I personally know have already gone to the other side. Once you do, you can suddenly work on more interesting problems, with more powerful tools, with on average smarter people, with few financial constraints... and you don't have to cook for yourself. For the rest of us left behind, the world looks more and more threadbare.

A few people do manage to emerge from the vortex, providing circumstantial evidence that human life does still exist on the other side. Many of them emerge talking about bureaucracy, politics, "big company attitude", projects that got killed, and how things "aren't like they used to be." And also how Google stock options aren't worth much because they've already IPO'd. But sadly, this is a pretty self-selecting group, so you can't necessarily trust what they're complaining about; presumably they'll be complaining about something, or they wouldn't have left.

What you really want to know is what the people who didn't leave are thinking. Which is a problem, because Google is so secretive that nobody will tell you much more than, "Google has free food. You should come work here." And I already knew that.

So let's get to the point: in the name of science (and free food, and because all my friends said I should go work there), I've agreed to pass through the Google Vortex starting on Monday. The bad news for you is, once I get through to the other side, I won't be able to tell you what I discover, so you're no better off. Google doesn't stop its employees from blogging, but you might have noticed that the blogs of Googlers don't tell you the things you really want to know. If the NDA they want me to sign is any indication, I won't be telling you either.

What I can do, however, is give you some clues. Here's what I'm hoping to do at Google:

• Work on customer-facing real technology products: not pure infrastructure and not just web apps.
• Help solve some serious internet-wide problems, like traffic shaping, real-time communication, bufferbloat, excessive centralization, and the annoying way that surprise popularity usually means losing more money (hosting fees) by surprise.
• Keep coding. But apparently unlike many programmers, I'm not opposed to managing a few people too.
• Keep working on my open source projects, even if it's just on evenings and weekends.
• Eat a lot of free food.
• Avoid the traps of long release cycles and ignoring customer feedback.
• Avoid switching my entire life to Google products, in the cases where they aren't the best... at least not without first making them the best.
• Stay so highly motivated that I produce more valuable software, including revenue, inside Google than I would have by starting a(nother) startup.

Talking to my friends "on the inside", I believe I can do all those things. If I can't achieve at least most of it, then I guess I'll probably quit. Or else I will discover, with the help of that NDA, that there's something even better to work on.

So that's my parting gift to you, my birth universe: a little bit of circumstantial evidence to watch for. Not long from now, assuming the U.S. immigration people let me into the country, I'll know too much proprietary information to be able to write objectively about Google. Plus, speaking candidly in public about your employer is kind of bad form; even this article is kind of borderline bad form.

This is probably the last you'll hear from me on the topic. From now on, you'll have to draw your own conclusions.