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[washingtonpost.com...]
"The employees of Google Inc. came aboard standard commercial buses. (It was cheaper than flying but meant that employees left company headquarters at 5:30 a.m. for the five-hour drive.) The rooms were crammed to maximum occupancy. (It wasn't unusual for strangers to be assigned to share double beds.) And while most of employees were at the resort or in transit for 36 hours, the company provided only two cafeteria-style, buffet meals. (The restaurants at the resort were too pricey.)"
You'd never guess that a number are billionaires & a lot of the rest are millionaires.
Hay ho!
Even the most stingy, crappy company I've ever worked for expected me to share a bed with another employee.
Also, who did you get to sleep with Googleguy?
But can you blame them for being stingy? After all, they now have investors to answer to.
You know the saying "do wat du wullt - de lüüt snakt doch"?
(no matter what you do, people will gossip about it)
nerd.
The media sure loves Google
No, they're interested in Google, but they're starting to hate them because of their success. There's an assumption that the entire company workforce is made up of multimillionaires too tight to spend a couple of dollars. What's the betting that simply there were actually no rooms left to volunteers shared rooms? What would the article have said if the entire company turned up in Ferraris and went on the rampage?
The article just looks like a load of Google-bashing useless gossip and rumor posing as journalism.
he actually didn't go. I bet he heard about bed sharing and decided that is not worth taking a chance. :) I don't blame him.
The Lake Tahoe airport is tiny and I seriously doubt it gets enough flights in a week to cart in that many employees.
So then there's the Reno airport, but that would require a long and tedious drive, depending on which part of Tahoe you're going to, so no time would be saved.
Travel time the same, discomfort the same, cost vastly different.
Even the most stingy, crappy company I've ever worked for expected me to share a bed with another employee.
A breeding experiment, maybe? An attempt to see if high IQs and Ph.D. degrees are scalable? :-)
A breeding experiment, maybe?
Next thing you know...we have GoogleBoy/GoogleGirl posting here...
The media sure loves Google. They report on everything they do.
It doesn't matter which city/town/village/company/quango/industry/government one lives and works in, there will always be someone jealous because one spends one's wealth, overly critical if one does not, wanting to know all the in's and out's of what is occuring and if they cannot ascertain that then there is always someone prepared to fabricate any amount of stories just to try and get headlines whether they have any of a half life of a resemblance to the truth!
At times the Net can be its own worst enemy creating and destroying at the touch of a submit button, seemingly without a care in the world.
Is it no wonder that some companies wrap themselves in such protective layers of Public Relation teams and Lawyers when one minute you're the blue-eyed boy and the next you're the evil reincarnation of Damien?
And before anyone starts preaching about ethics...just read your own criticisms and sarcasm.
I just wish I'd been clever and lucky enough to be one of the few at the plex to have worked hard enough to reap the rewards. Don't you?
After all, has this not been the successful American Dream story?
The basic message of the article, to me, was the following:
a) It was a pretty good event, all things considered.
b) A lot of what was done was specifically done in a sense of restraint, because they don't want the taint of the 99ers
So, yes, it looks like it was a pretty neat event. And it also looks like it achieved what many corporate events/retreats aim to but often don't manage:
People from different parts of the company who'd never met, got together, chatted, got friendly, and started sharing ideas.
Given the collective brainpower of the people working for G, I would've killed to be a fly on the wall during some of those conversations.
Ok, so if Google starts creating their own PhD's they'll need to ramp up their indexing of infant and children's books and video's. Perhaps even have a specific crawler ... perhaps goo-goobot? :)
...and $2.65 for Chapstick *is* insane, 85 cents around here...
you have to be careful there. You need lifeguard at the gene pool :). Einstein's wife was a very good mathemetician--actually did the math for his theory of relativity--and their kid was born schizophrenic. [google.com...]
There's a fine line between genius and what we call define as an illness. John Nash and Bobby Fisher come to mind too.
next topic.
you cared enough to post twice in this thread ;)
The article just looks like a load of Google-bashing useless gossip and rumor posing as journalism.
In a few years you'll see it as the first in a series of articles describing how Google went from an employee-centered company to a profit-centered company. If you want publicity -- and Google did -- then you have to take the good with the bad.
They probably searched on Google for cheap last minute flights but could only find 6 year old sites about the Wright Brothers!
<sarcasm>That's right. The older a website is, the better it is (especially for subjects like emerging technology).</sarcasm>
Even the most stingy, crappy company I've ever worked for expected me to share a bed with another employee.
Wild. Over at [webmasterworld.com...] people were saying Google is too extravagant. Over in this thread, we're too stingy..
...and $2.65 for Chapstick *is* insane, 85 cents around here...Yes, lemme guess, your 85 cent chapstick really IS Chapstick and has an SPF of 0, but a wonderful watermelon sparkle.;) Quality costs more in general but there is a premium to pay for not thinking ahead. The prices for such items are definitely more expensive at High Camp than they are at the Grocery Store 4 miles down the road and 2,000 feet down.
Its a good thing they didn't come to Heavenly, home of the $12 burger and $6.50 beer.
As a public company, Google Guys and Gals will just have to become familiar with the concept that people are fickle!
Watch out, next year there might be a hot discussion about the annual Christmas party punch budget! :)
Living in Tahoe is often described as "Poverty with a View". Anything that comes along to improve our standard of living without hurting the view is welcome anytime.
Thanks for coming G! Next year how about the South Shore, we've got lots more rooms.
[edited by: Powdork at 5:17 am (utc) on Jan. 26, 2005]
If I worked there (sigh!) and given the option, I'd take my share of the trip in cash.
Whuzzat? $150 maybe? Ring-a-ding-ding.
I'd drive over to Half Moon Bay for some fish and chips, away from work and coworkers.
Wild. Over at [webmasterworld.com...] people were saying Google is too extravagant. Over in this thread, we're too stingy..
Get used to it GG... you guys are the new big bad wolf everyone wants to take a crack at.
sad, but true... success breeds contempt
They probably searched on Google for cheap last minute flights but could only find 6 year old sites about the Wright Brothers!
That is priceless! LOL :)
Given how useless G$ SERPs are, that is so funny in the truth of its sarcastic implication!
Someone else said,
success breeds contempt
Although true, that's not the case for many of us. Indeed, many of us former-loyal-to-G$ webdevelopers have seen the beginning of G$'s own self-caused demise. They betrayed the honest webmasters and have created a SE with useless SERPs.
It is G$'s own doing, being supposedly "smarter" than they need to be that the choices they now make are downright stupid instead.
G$ have "over-thought" so many supposed "ideas" and/or "solutions" that only caused worse problems. (E.g., The false "solution" of penalizing cross-linked sites on similiar IPs instead wipes out entire support communities who host together in order to support their community's advance -- so an entire topic of sites becomes decimated for searchers. For another E.g., googlebot cannot read/obey a sizable robots.txt file and so G$ still lists sites that had been DISALLOWED. For yet another E.g., G$ violates their own AW Guidelines by purposely allowing false and off-topic ads in AW and then claiming the lie that "CTR" defines relevance -- when lying ads obviously mislead the users into clicks. I could go on and on. Their "solutions" only make matters worse. Self-sabotage!)
G$ is no longer a valid SE with useable SERPs, and by betraying the very webdeveloper community who put them on the map in the first place, G$ has opened the door themselves to their own demise as a SE.
The only way that they can turn that around is to stop trying be so "smart" in which they are actually being so stupid. But I am not holding my breath. When you destroy and betray your very supporters, you are evil incarnate. "Do only evil" has become G$'s real motto.
