If you're interested in this subject, Robert Hughes wrote a fantastic reflection about the mythic days of generous staff expense accounts at Time. Truly unfathomable today.
At some point in the future, the perks one finds today at Facebook and Google will someday be similarly unfathomable.
Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss, and it will all fade similarly.
Don't know what that technology is, or when it will happen, but the fat days for nearly every industry eventually come to an end.
"Fat days" end for individual companies too. Google had much better perks/food in the early days. Same goes for many profitable startups (like Dropbox) who cut their lavish spendings once they realize they need to go public: http://www.businessinsider.com/cost-cutting-at-dropbox-and-s...
Some parts of the world would tell you those days have already come with the wages you'll find for engineers of any rank.
The last shop that contacted me ranged from 35k to 60k CAD. They couldn't even keep the appointment they had made with me in advance.
There's a rise in people who work with technology (procurement managers, for one), however, who are often paid 4x to 6x as much as that last shop. They are, in my experience anyway, half as informed as anyone who has directly worked on similar technologies. But I digress.
Most engineering jobs never had perks like those found at Google and Facebook, just like most journalism jobs never had perks like those found at Time, Inc.
Although the cases are quite similar: Magazines and newspapers once were solid industries with some highly-profitable companies and where one could at least get a solid wage, and, if one was lucky, one could live a luxurious life on the company's dime.
Now even the strongest newspapers and magazines are struggling, and one is lucky to have a job in the field at all, never mind a basic expense account.
Someday that will happen to the Googles and Facebooks of the technology industry, and similarly to the perks they once provided their employees.
I think this is a classic case of someone using a term informally [me] being questioned by someone who wants to use a term formally, and exclusively so [you].
Unfortunately, language often doesn't work like that.
Software engineering is a very different job market from engineering-engineering (the one that involves the title Professional Engineer), so in this case the distinction is justified.
I wouldn't say that all programming really qualifies as engineering but if you don't think it's part of an engineering discipline, you should probably tell schools like MIT who give computer science degrees (which certainly include programming) out of their engineering schools.
Software development is engineering, because like all engineering, it is using knowledge and Technology to build things that solve human problems. I say this as someone who has an Electronics engineering degree.
My computer science degree (from www.epfl.ch) comes with an official (as in, legally protected [0]) engineer title.
Not all people, institutions, countries make the same distinction between "real engineering" topics and other topics that you seem to be assuming.
[0]: in Switzerland, it's the specific claim to have an engineering degree from the EPFL that is protected. https://bachelor.epfl.ch/structure-etudes (in French) also mentions that France - where "engineer" is a protected title - officially recognises EPFL graduates as engineers...
There is a Professional Engineer exam for software engineering in the US but it's going away because almost no one sits for it. Getting a PE is by no means universal for other engineering branches in the US either. It's most common in industries where you deal with regulators and have to sign off on plans, drawings, etc. for those regulators.
When I worked as a mechanical engineer for oil rig design and other work, I took an engineer-in-training exam and would have gotten a PE after working for the requisite number of years.
"If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death." - from Hammurabi's code [0][1], circa 1754 BC.
Liability in the case of house-building has been established for millennia. Liability in the case of social networks is somewhat less well-established. I'd argue that being able to deal with the consequences of the results (e.g. the social consequences of ads and posts in the 2016 election, or leaking private conversations, or hitting pedestrians from today's HN front page) is a key part of maturing an engineering field.
The professionalism of the trade itself has little to do with the nature of the work itself.
Software development and network management are engineering work, but the trades have yet to develop engineering guilds as with mechanical, civil, aeronautical, electrical, chemical, etc., engineering.
The present situation with data breeches, social impacts, systems vulnerabilities (think IoT) may change this. The fluidityy of tthe field makes this challenging.
Engineering certification itself isn't some eternal concept.
> I'd argue that being able to deal with the consequences of the results (e.g. the social consequences of ads and posts in the 2016 election, or leaking private conversations, or hitting pedestrians from today's HN front page)
The same way you can argue that the constructions and architeture also have social consequences both positive and negative but the engineers and architects are responsible only for the physical structure.
Yes I do. If more people got training or specifically we had some building codes or ethics training about how to make a social network that isn’t harmful to those millions that participate in it, we might not be in the state we are in right now.
> Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss...
Bear in mind that with extravagant perks and 20% time, Google's strategy was explicitly to maximize the chance that this new idea would be produced by Google itself.
It's interesting to look back at to what extent this has and has not panned out. For example, how come Facebook and Dropbox were not developed at Google and it had to crash-create competing products? Do any of Google's non-search properties count as next big things? Arguably AdSense perhaps, but that depended on being Google to start with.
WRT Dropbox, Google has their cloud platform. It got off to a bit of rocky start but, today, it's clearly one of the handful of big public cloud platforms which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd argue that being a major public cloud is ultimately more important than having a relatively niche storage offering like Dropbox.
Google's big failure has been in social pretty much across the board. It's tried a bunch of things beginning with Orkut and it's all amounted to pretty much zilch. I suspect that there's some fundamental mindset mismatch going on.
GSuite/Gmail has been pretty successful (as has maps). Being very competitive with a company (Microsoft) that had a huge incumbent's advantage has to count for something.
We'll see if projects like Waymo ever amount to something. IMO commercial applications are further out than many think and it's unclear the degree to which it will be Goggle who makes a lot of money from it.
I would say it did panned out. Gmail, Google News, Google Reader, Orkut [released before Facebook and becoming a leading social network in South America for a while] and many other projects were built as part of the 20%.
The challenge wasn't to get people to build incredible new ideas, it was the same as in every large company with "an unit" generating ideas, like Xerox -> PARC, Bell Telephone Company -> Bell Labs, etc. The leadership doesn't care about any of this, they want to expand their main business.
No executive wants to be made obsolete and be replaced by the next thing run by other executives. Google is no different. For instance Orkut (person, not site) was running the site on his own on couple of servers the whole time. Google paid very little attention to it.
There was a period in my life when that was what I would have liked to have done. But it was always a superstar type of industry and it was at the tail end of the culture in any case.
I remember liking Time magazine a number of years ago.
Then either they changed or I did, I'm not certain which. Sometime along 2000 or so it seems their point of view took a pointed political turn. (I feel the same towards ESPN, CNN, etc.)
When that happened, it ceased to become news to me. It was more 'entertainment', and I admit they still had some interesting ideas. But I didn't really trust Time anymore. At that point, they had reached the point of no return, it was no longer 'must read' literature. I could easily skip it, and I often did.
I have to echo this sentiment. I described it to a friend as me losing confidence in using Time as a reference in a semi-formal graduate paper. It sort of became an entertainment classification in my mind after that too.
That was exactly the period when blogging came into its own and current events were happening at such a pace (9/11! anthrax in the mail! aluminum tubes!) that news-lite magazines like Time pretty much had to get out of the game.
Time Magazine in the days of Henry Luce was already politicized, for instance, being a strong supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek. I'm not sure what political turn you have in mind, though.
Is it that wild or political to support a leader trying to protect China from communist rule and the cultural destruction caused by Mao Zedong? It doesn’t seem political so much as just supporting basic human rights.
"Supporting basic human rights" is nearly always politicized. Consider how little we hear about human rights in Saudi Arabia, undoubtedly a repressive regime, versus other countries with which the United States has unfriendly relations.
Furthermore, the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a supporter of human rights really doesn't line up well with reality.
Chiang Kai-Shek is not exactly known for his respect of human rights; he became a dictator notable for his brutal suppression of dissent and political opposition.
It does not get more political than human rights and supporting basic human rights is a genuinely political position. Not sure what concept of politics would be needed to manage to exclude such hot-topics from its plate.
I have a collection of war-time and after '45-'53 Time magazines. The sheer palpable weight of the government minders on the writers is clearly evident. The magazine has always been 'political'.
I subscribed to Time around then and tend to agree... it shifted from news to entertainment in my mind. I remember being puzzled why they gave ink to Joel Stein (?) writing an odd mix of comedy/irony as a news magazine feature. It seemed like an odd desperate grasp for new young readership but it alienated their base, even the younger ones of us. It wasn't what I signed up for and I let my subscription lapse.
I know that for all the ones I used to like I changed into liking their older releases more. But they changed so much that I can't stand any of them today.
The article has a Mad Men -like quality to it. Ivy-elites white males running the business, women related to research roles. Amazon has a series which reflect the news business, based on Newsweek, from the 1960s.
The culture was so “Mad Men,” even at the height of the
feminist movement, that my boss felt free, when we worked
late closing the magazine on Fridays nights, taking all the
young male writers out to dinner at the steakhouse
downstairs without a thought that they were walking past the
offices of the only two women in the hall — me and my
friend, the late Susan Tifft. Susan, a staunch feminist,
confronted the boss. But we never did get to that
steakhouse.
I'm not sure why some people felt that was an unfair comment. I remember discussions in the late 70s (in a journalism class) over why you'd have these coincidental covers in Time and Newsweek.And the answer was basically that everyone was from the same background so of course they were seeing and hearing the same things.
I've been a Time subscriber in various ways for decades. It used to be the primary way that I ingested news. But times (ahem) have changed.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and ideological flamebait to HN? They're not what this site is for, and you've unfortunately done it repeatedly.
Time was never a "left-wing mag", in any era. The Nation, In These Times, Ramparts -- those are/were left-wing mags. Time was always about the establishment, and Great Men, and the vital center.
There are many wings in the halls of the left. I'd consider Time as biased to the left but they voiced the ideology of the establishment, coastal, urban leftist elite. They espoused the kind of left wing viewpoints expected of a mainstream Democratic Party politician much the same way as the Wall Street Journal and now Fox News espouses the views of the establishment elite of the right wing. They were to the "Liberals" what those other sources are for "Neoconservatives" while the rest of the wings in their halls find their voice in more fringe outlets.
To someone further out on the left, they appear centrist. To someone on the right the leftist-bias immediately places them in the broader category of "leftist" even if they are far closer to the center than most outlets.
Mother Jones these days is pretty much "Hillary Democrat," as far as I can tell. But there are other leftist magazines like the Baffler, n + 1, Current Affairs, and so on.
(1) https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the...