No. I found out on the last day of orientation I would be doing YouTube ads. I knew there was no way I could do that for 18 months, and I told my manager. He was understanding, but there wasn't really anything he could do. He passed my concerns up the management chain.

A couple weeks later my manager gave me their response, which was, literally, "We don't care." That shocked me a little, and I knew at that point I wouldn't be at Google for very long. Maybe that was even the right thing for them to do, since I was proving myself to be the kind of employee who wouldn't work on a project they weren't interested in for a year and a half just because it was good for Google, or good for their potential career at Google.

For a short time I led a 20% project with three other engineers that was in my interest area, and after we won an innovation award I hoped that it might make the Google bureaucracy more sympathetic to my preferences, but management didn't care. I left not long after that.

(tl;dr: I learned that Google is a bureaucratic megacorp.)

Impressive.

From the marketing video it looks like Android 4.2 gained Swype-like keyboard.

It seems that they're no longer using tablet UI, even on Nexus 10 (i.e. it has status bar on top, navigation buttons are in the middle of the screen). That's weird, and I definitely don't like it, but it might not be that big of a problem.

Two days later they rescinded and said they would not be giving me an offer without explanation. I was really pissed off.

A couple years later they contacted me again for a job and started the interview process, then I told them what happened the last time. They then said they didn't want to proceed.

Then a few month ago they contacted me again (these were all for basically the same job) - I sent the recruiter a rather terse email stating my experiences and said "stop wasting my time - either give me the job at salary $X or stop contacting me."

They replied that they couldnt meet my salary requirements.

Personally their recruiting method is farking ridiculous.

That Thursday came and went, and I found out that due to some internal bar-raising I would not be receiving an offer. I stayed here in the Detroit area, moved up with my current company, married my wife, and settled into being quite happy here.

Five years on I regularly have Google recruiters contacting me both via phone and email, asking if I'm interested in a position, and exclaiming how good the interview feedback was. When I decline to revisit any opportunity which would require me to move across the country, the recruiters are universally flabbergasted.

Sorry Google, the time when I was excited to move across the country has passed. I still want to do interesting things, I'll just do them on my terms now.

This is good news.

Even better news is Browett's ouster. The business with his cutting operational corners in retail was a very, very bad omen. If they'd left him in, he might have poisoned a very important well for the company. Hopefully his replacement is closer to Ron Johnson's set of retail and service values.

N'bad, Tim.

He did say that Microsoft and Apple are moving away from the open platform model and that Valve has always been in favor of open platforms. Linux is the best option for a continuing open platform in the future.

Actual video of the talk will be online within a day or so, so I suggest you watch that instead of reading contrite stories like this one.

Here is a much better article about the talk from OMG Ubuntu: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/valve-talk-steam-for-linu...

"Meets Expectations" ranges from 3.0 to 3.4, and employees in this range have no idea where in that interval they landed, even the career effects of the numbers are dramatically different. 3.4 is above average, while 3.0 is fatal to transfer and promotion, even years later, but unlikely to get someone actually fired. There are several managers who've been caught using 3.0-3.1 to keep people captive but unaware of the fact that they've been internally blacklisted. It's disgusting but it happens.

Whoever came up with the "innovation" of making review history part of a transfer packet (and that has nothing to do with Google; it pre-dates it) is a domestic terrorist and should get the same treatment that all the other terrorists get. It's a horrible system that eats companies from the inside. Enron's cultural decline (leading in macroscopic ethical lapses and bankruptcy) has been established to be a direct result of its globally-visible, mobility-destroying review system.

Google's Perf is a play-for-play copy of Enron's PRC, but Google probably won't go the way of Enron for extrinsic reasons. A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises to beat PRC, whereas a lot Googlers leave for greener pastures when that happens.

Compare that to cereal crops like wheat or maize or vegetable crops, which require long uninterrupted growing seasons and irrigation.

Why is this important? When a troop of rampaging soldiers cuts through your village and pillages everything in sight, you grab your cows and family and boogey out of there. Essentially, you have a mobile food supply.

In the event of a drought, you have options as well. With wheat or vegetables, no rain == no food. With a dairy animal, you go kill the guy who controls the next pasture and let Old Bessie the cow feast on the grass. (The other key development was the introduction of potatoes, which remain buried under the ground safe from the rampaging army above -- my Irish ancestors subsisted on potatoes hidden from the English taxman and a cow that lived in the house.)

In Europe and the Near East, these things were really important, because there was always pillaging armies marching across the continent. Today, it's unlikely that some Mongol horde is going to loot my supermarket, so I drink milk and eat cheese because they are really tasty.

Indeed, this has been expected since Jony Ive was observed standing immediately to Tim Cook's right at the last Red Square May Day parade.

    <a href="http://google.com" id="link">Google</a>

    document.querySelector("#link").addEventListener('click', function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();
        document.location = 'http://evil.com';
    }, false);

Sure! I'd be happy to.

The way Hacker News works is, people submit content.

If people like the content, they vote it up. Sufficiently high-voted content reaches the front page. 55 people have voted this up at the time of this comment, feeling the content was worth their attention. Given the recency of the content relative to the votes it has received, it occupies the position you see on the front page.

Is there anything else I can help with?

For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique.

I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.

The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link.

So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.

It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway.

And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised.

@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use.

Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)

@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.