While Kevin's goodbye indicates his relative admiration for the company, I'm sure that the slew of Google engineers and designers that worked on GMail, Calendar, and Reader will be very pleased to see Kevin singularly take credit for the design of their products. |
Nathan Stoll, product manager of Google News also leaves!!
http://www.nathanstoll.com/blog/2007/12/breaking-up-with-google-difficult.html |
OMG lots of high-up people are leaving Google recently |
Philipp: Thanks for the thoughtful write-up! Those portrait frame-grabs are great, nd I'm suitably embarrassed by the link to the hokey .Mac video.
Eugene: I don't mean to take credit for anyone else's work. My resume only means to say that as an Interaction Designer I led the the user experience design for Gmail 1.0, Calendar 1.0, and Reader 2.0, and that I was the only interaction designer on those products until well after they launched. This shouldn't be interpreted as saying I 'built' the product, or 'invented' the product (although in the case of Calendar, it began as a 20% project between me and another engineer), but a designer designs. |
just in--
"David Hirsch, an eight-year Google sales vet who helped open the company's New York office, is leaving the company at the end of January." |
Google is filled with very smart and very talented engineers. Many of these people are nearing the end of their initial 4yr grants. Google, for some strange reason, DOES NOT understand how to use stock options and grants as a retention tool and instead lets their superstars fully vest without significant followup. As a result, you have tons of people looking logically at the situation e.g., last year I made $2m, this year I'm back to $150k/yr. Should I stay, or should I look for growth elsewhere... When you are in this mode, It's much smarter to move on/take a risk where an opportunity for reward exists rather than do the same work at Google while taking an 1.85m/yr "pay cut". The people that stay are the ones to worry about. They tend to be risk averse and over time will turn Google into a tech zombie like Microsoft. |
I'm still willing to work at Google for free :P |
People are making a lot of fuss about Google Leavers, but it's all a bit silly. Most had been at Google for some years ... and many have not left, of course.
Without any knowledge of Google's retention rate compared to others, it's meaningless to focus on a few individuals, all of whom left on good terms.
Trying to apply Paris Hilton style celebrity status to Googlers is a fairly limited exercise.
I wouldn't work for them for free, but I'm very cheap! |
Kevin Fox Leaves Google ... and joins FriendFeed!
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/01/another-new-friendfeeder.html |
Good to see a great bunch of Xooglers working together on FriendFeed. |
...which will inevitably be acquired by Google and incorporated into the next generation of orkut. |
Kevin Fox now works at Friendfeed:
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/01/another-new-friendfeeder.html
(This news is already some days old, but I just came across it...) |
>> This news is already some days old...
Yeah, see above... ;-)
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/120068.html#id120274 |
Calendar 1.0 ? Does that mean a 2.0 is in the works? |
PierreS, I think the current incarnation is Calendar 2.0. IIRC its code name before it was released was CL2. But whether that's the same as Calendar 2.0 I have no idea... |
