On the search side, i’m really impressed with kagi. They are a paid service, but you can try them out for free no strings attached.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 month ago
i worked for cognizant, a contractor for google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned.
Google is a trash compant with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason.
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 1 month ago
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 1 month ago
You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.
If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, “why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don’t need to unionize!” And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don’t buy insurance for the same reason.
I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.
(I’m not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.
Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
I don’t doubt you at all - I’ve seen quite a few stories of Google exhibiting retribution against employees attempting to unionize.
The point I was trying to make (admittedly quite badly) is that Google employees should have unionized a long time ago, when they had the upper hand. At this point, it’s a much steeper uphill climb. But it is still a very worthy fight.