{"id":23142,"date":"2018-10-19T15:14:15","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T19:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=23142"},"modified":"2018-10-19T15:14:15","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T19:14:15","slug":"paul-buchheit-on-joining-and-leaving-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/19\/paul-buchheit-on-joining-and-leaving-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Buchheit on Joining and Leaving Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Buchheit<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

I didn’t believe in the business or think the company would be a huge success, though. I thought they were going to be roadkill and would get squashed by one of the big internet companies. By then, Yahoo was already a behemoth, and Alta Vista had so much money. I didn’t understand how this little startup would be able to compete. But I decided I didn’t care. I wanted to go work on Linux stuff and figured I’d at least meet some smart people there, and maybe they’d later start a company that would actually be successful.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, I realize the early team at Google was actually quite remarkable. I think they made a real point of hiring smart people. In part, that was because they were working on really interesting problems and smart people want to work on interesting problems. I remember Jeff Dean had gone to work at another startup before Google and immediately fixed all of their problems. When he asked, “Now what do I do?,” it turned out that they had nothing else interesting to work on, so he left. He was drawn into Google because of the interesting systems problems there.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn’t noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don’t know who are telling me to do stuff that I don’t care about.” I knew immediately that if I stayed at Google, and wanted to be successful and influential, I would have to become more of a big company person. I knew that I had the capacity to do that, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to do something else, so I left.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Buchheit (via Hacker News): I didn’t believe in the business or think the company would be a huge success, though. I thought they were going to be roadkill and would get squashed by one of the big internet companies. By then, Yahoo was already a behemoth, and Alta Vista had so much money. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-10-19T19:14:17Z","apple_news_api_id":"461689f1-399a-4b4e-a5ae-033e9f5acf94","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-10-19T19:14:18Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ARhaJ8TmaS06lrgM-n1rPlA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[101,433,51,295,261],"class_list":["post-23142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-history","tag-intel"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23143,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23142\/revisions\/23143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}