I've been saying this for a long time and I really believe it. At least borderline evil. It seems to me there's nothing doing more damage to (web) technology than Google hording many (most?) of the world's greatest hackers and severely under utilizing their abilities.

I can only speak for the East Coast, and in microeconomic terms, but Google has definitely put a hurt on the market here. They are worse than all of the banks put together. The cream of the crop here---people who are too smart to veg out in a bank---are more than willing to go to Google, when they would otherwise be furthering some smaller and more important project, be it a startup, or just something else useful and in real need of a bright, computer-oriented mind. They're all funneling into Google. Google got them all right out of college, and they're probably going to keep them.

You cannot argue that we are better off this way. Google certainly is, but as a whole we are going to lose out. Clumping all those people together is not going to improve technology. It's going to make it worse, because there's a huge opportunity cost in taking all these people and sticking them in a mill. That's just how software works. If they were out in little groups in a lot of different areas, they could be making a huge difference. Google doesn't need 10,000 engineers who know Bellman-Ford and Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Miller-Rabin. It's too much overlap. And Google certainly isn't providing offerings in a quantity great enough to justify the overlap. They've hired well---too well---and now they're going to be having a great number of these people performing well below where they would if they were arbitraged out to somewhere else. The benefit of adding just one of these engineers to a smaller shop is incalculably higher than the benefit of giving him to Google.

That efficient asset allocation, and the providing of liquidity, have been grossly exaggerated in terms of their benefit to society in order to justify the poaching Wall Street does each year, is a truth generally acknowledged. Trading makes a few people much richer, but it does not make us richer, not in equal part. In fact, if you want to get nasty about it, the latest round of bailouts is costing us a great deal...

Now we've traded the Wall Street problem for the Google problem. Do we really need the top sliver of our graduates working on destructively taking market share from PayPal? Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created? Or contributing to an advertising arms-race at a growth rate much higher than that of the underlying market?

What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? I feel like if it was anything suitable I would've already heard of it by now.

2. What you don't seem to realize is that the existing college curriculum in almost all US colleges, including the ivy league ones, do not correctly prepare a student for a real software engineering environment. Sure it's nice to learn all about algorithms and patterns and all that stuff, but until you actually dive into being part of a million-line project, you don't really know what it's like. Google is providing valuable real-world training to these freshies, using throw-away projects, well except sometimes one of those throw-away projects becomes something real and important. They also are creating a new generation of elite programmers who are setting new expectations in the marketplace such as:

        a. Only technical people should manage technical people.
        b. Programmers should be given the freedom to innovate and exercise their creativity.
        c. Programmers should be pampered and treated to luxury so that they don't have to worry about anything other than coding.

3. There are already TONS of startups started by ex-googlers, so in short, what I see, is not that Google is sucking up all this smart talent and then wasting them on creating ad-space. What I see is Google is gathering all this untrained potential, adding engineering discipline and high expectations from employers, and then letting them loose to spawn their own innovations.

4. In my personal experience, jealousy and whining makes you feel better temporarily, but they don't really solve any problems and they just keep you stuck in your current mode so that you forget to look for real solutions to your real problems. When you are a child, if you fall down and start crying, your mommy or some other adult will come over and pick you up and make you feel better again. When you become an adult you have to pick yourself up.

Get some googlers to co-found with me, ideally...

Do we really need PayPal in the first place? We had credit card companies already, and eBay had its own offering before PayPal. Hell, do we really need Google? Alta Vista was already here, why did we need another search engine? All that competition is just "destructive" "duplication".

Or maybe the reason why we have duplication is that some people like one service better. Other people call duplication "competition", and on net it has done a lot of good for this world. Each company tries to get better than the other, and we all win (except for the companies competing, sometimes). This process is what Schumpeter called "creative destruction".

But maybe you're right, and competition is destructive. Maybe we should just appoint ONE company to have a monopoly on each product in the marketplace. Should we abolish Apple, which is just "destructively" copying Microsoft? Should we draw-and-quarter anyone caught running Linux? Does that sound like a better world?

>Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created?

So, is the problem competition or monopoly?

You have very strong opinions on where other people choose to work and who should be able to hire them. It sounds like you just want a really bright person or group of people to assign all the tech grads to jobs. Similar things have been tried before, and the outcome wasn't too good.

No one is saying competition is bad. The point is we don't need all our geniuses competing with PayPal---it shouldn't be that hard in the first place. Let someone else do it.

>You have very strong opinions on where other people choose to work and who should be able to hire them. It sounds like you just want a really bright person or group of people to assign all the tech grads to jobs. Similar things have been tried before, and the outcome wasn't too good.

On the contrary. I want really bright people to assign themselves in a way that isn't ridiculous.

That is, ridiculous to you. You want the job market to fit your idea of what people should be doing.

Google is the seemingly invincible Tyrant. It had the foresight to see that computer science would soon be extinct if programmers were allowed to continue working for large mindless corporations. It hires Gholas (I mean programmers) for their skills, but who are increasingly suspicious of the uses their skills are put to. When at last the Tyrant dies, the programmers will scatter, never again willing to work for a big company.

The most likely possibility is that there isn't one. Google is a company built by academics with Ph.D.s who were so successful, so fast, right out of school that they've concluded that the secret to life is being a Ph.D.-level academic. Believe me, that's a serious occupational hazard among those of us with that much education. It's the classic trap. You're constantly tempted to fall back on the fallacy that anything you spent so much of your time on must be intrinsically valuable.

So they've built a think tank. It's no better or worse than other think tanks, like the MIT Media Lab or Xerox PARC or Bell Labs or Agilent Labs or IBM's old labs. Like those institutions of yore, Google milks its enormous cash cow and uses the money to fund pie-in-the-sky projects. Some of those projects will eventually change the world... perhaps after their creators leave Google and found startups. Others of those projects will circle round and round forever. Still others don't amount to anything, but because their inventors are under very little pressure -- why fire them, when you can just ask the cash cow for another $2 million to keep them on staff? -- they persist.

I think it's a mistake to assume that most of the Googlers are working on "destructively taking market share from Paypal". Google's core assets work too well to be the product of a giant committee. I'm guessing that the technical portion of the SEO-fighting arm of Google is just a dozen people, with perhaps another two dozen assistants. Another huge group of people is sales reps and customer service and other things that don't scale well. Most of the rest of Google is a giant research organization, dedicated to searching all of known phase space for the next cash cow. If they find it before the current cow gives out, Google gets another 20 years of profits. If not, Google will eventually explode.

Sometimes that strategy works. From the outside, it really is eerily similar to the early days of Apple Computer. Apple was much crazier, in fact: In the early '80s they were rolling in cash and therefore had absolutely no incentive to impose fiscal discipline. They reportedly ran open-loop, without a budget, for several years. The company was a free-for-all collection of quasi-independent projects that sometimes contradicted each other. And that very nearly doomed them to be squashed by IBM... except that, whoops, one of those tiny one-person pie-in-the-sky research projects was the guy working on the Macintosh. Then Steve Jobs found that guy, seized the project, and it became 12 people working to ship the Macintosh. And eventually the Mac became the next cash cow that bought the company another 20 years.

But sometimes your think tank is Xerox PARC, and it becomes most famous as a place where brilliant engineers get all their training and practice before eventually quitting in disgust and founding the startups that actually make all the money. There's real danger that Google will follow that route. Caring and feeding for a think tank is a difficult job, one that Google's founders aren't necessarily cut out for. It's not like they're magically immune to the Peter Principle.

We shall see. But I wouldn't worry that the Googlers are wasting their time. History suggests that frustrated think-tank refugees can be incredibly productive startup founders. They have Things to Prove.

the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before.

the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)

Brainpower is sucked to where the money is and thats not necessarily the best place for it to be for the greater good.

I guess you could say Google is evil if it was doing it under false pretenses

Satirising two large companies so comprehensively in one sentence is brilliant.