Mmm…whoa, it’s been almost three months since I’ve started working for the G. It has gone by surprisingly quickly; I suppose having to learn a bunch of new systems helps move the clock hand.
Having been at startups for the past two years, it’s a bit of a shock to go back to a corporate environment, especially one as different as Google’s. On one hand, the big-company benefits are mostly as good as the recruiter’s pitch – nice having decent food, a well-stocked kitchen, generous medical insurance and matching 401k again. The other hand is dealing with the sheer scale of a twenty-thousand employee-company, where every meeting requires a conference call across five different time zones and everybody is a stranger in the office.
It’s the NBA Playoffs, the perfect time to peruse sports columns, blogs, and general comments from fans and haters. I had forgotten how much of the game – specifically, the hype and rumor mill that the media drives to keep the chatter alive – is about statistic overanalysis and unfounded conclusions. Well, that, and the third-grade trash talk.
At some point in modern sporting history, though, someone came up with the ingenious idea of trying to quantify sports with stats. Now, I think it started as a good idea; in basketball, other than the points scored, people first started caring about rebounds, assists, steals, and other metrics that correlate with a team’s success on the court.
It makes for a pointed study in using stats to say whatever the hell you’d want.
Hey, it’s been a while since I wrote. That time – a good amount of it between jobs – has been spent starting and finishing a few gaming single player adventures. It’s good to see that some games are still worth playing, for entertainment and I guess for enrichment.
Here’s a quick recount.
Well, it was a fun ride; I’ve moved on from Lolapps, and as of this posting, a week from starting a new gig at the big G (really, that’s Google, not “grad school” as someone had guessed…). The experience has been enormously educational:
- working for a startup since its infancy;
- growing the company in scope and size;
- building apps on top of a rapidly iterating and emerging platform in the Facebook App ecosystem;
I’d easily recommend any aspiring entrepreneurs, engineers, or web-savvy netizens to try their hands on similar opportunities. That said, after having fought the battles and learned the lessons for the better part of two years, I realized it was time for me to bow out of the system and return to more traditional software products.
Here’s why.
The holidays are always a great time for pictures. Me, armed with the iPhone’s 3MP teeny camera and a 12MP Sony TSC point-and-shoot, was ready to commemorate the occasion and maybe even get a few decent prints out. Hell, maybe I’ll actually learn to shoot bokeh or HDR or whatever.
Photography’s one of those hobbies guys flock to – along with cars and video games – after a certain stage in life; in this case, it’s usually right around having a kid and wanting to cherish the early years. It’s also one that’s been widely practiced since the advent of digital cameras and onboard image processing, rendering most shots into passable email material. Like most people, I approached the subject of picture-takin’ from a purely utilitarian perspective: I wanted to etch memories into physical being. My artistic side (admittedly, limited) hated how 90% of my shots weren’t even clear enough for a normal print, and those that were in focus looked aggressively ordinary. I knew there were lessons in composition, exposure, white balance, and depth of focus I had to learn, but every time I read an article and tried to replicate the results, I was met with disappointing quality.
The next web revolution – Web 3.0 – is going to be centered around real-time data and search, so say the tech media mavens. Leading the charge is of course Twitter (now available in your search in both Google and Microsoft form), but everybody else is jumping into the fray too, saying how awesome it is to report locations, in real-time, and otherwise leave a conspicuous digital trail ripe for exploit.
When CNN and Fox News are holding regular news segments that consist of nothing more than reading prescreened online posts, you know traditional media is desperately trying to speed up the news cycle too.
I say it’s going in the wrong direction.