Monday, July 7, 2008

Criticism of Google on Day Care Facilities and More

The New York Times has a piece critical of Google’s handling of their day care management facilities for parents. Besides the core issues surrounding a 75% raise of the in-house day care costs, there’s several peppered quotes. For instance, the author Joe Nocera refers to people who heard Google co-founder Sergey Brin saying he has no sympathy for the parents and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms”. Google denies Sergey made this statement, the NYT says.

Over at Friendfeed, some Google employees and ex-employees got to discuss the article, with some saying the article is biased or editorializing, while others say quotes from the articles were quite representative of what they’ve heard by other employees at Google, too. Ex-Google employee Kevin Fox writes, “I don’t know the rationales behind the actions, but a friend of mine at Google was brought to tears battling these changes before it ever made it to Valleywag or the NYT. There are Google parents who are very, very upset about this, no matter how badly the NYT article was written.” Ex-Google employee Paul Buchheit remarks, “It seems like everyone has ideas on how to do this at a lower cost than Google. Maybe someone should open a competing ’google’ daycare near the Google campus – from the sounds of it there would be hundreds of eager customers.”

The NYT also refers to a posting by Sergey Solyanik for some more Google criticism. Solyanik worked at Google but now went back to working at Microsoft. One of his dislikes of Google is that mostly, Google users don’t pay for the software they’re using. “For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.” Solyanik also calls Google’s Blogger tool a time waster, though interestingly enough it’s the same tool he uses to write his stinging post...

Criticism of Google on Da ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

>> More posts

Advertisement