100%. You nailed it. Very heartening to hear this, always been unsure of my most personal analysis, as it was limited to one corp in one era.
Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).
I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.
I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.
I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"
I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.
Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).
I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.
I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.
I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"
I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.