Recommendation from me: Have your child read a Gerald Durrell book (My Family and Other Animals is one of his best) when they are 12-15. It will be a fantastic read and will make them dream about pursuing something of their own, most likely animals at first, but other things later.
Not so sure HN type adults will enjoy Gerald Durrell as much :).
Would have to strongly disagree on the snacks. In 47, our snacks disappear very quickly, and there's definitely not 75 different types. There's maybe 10. Tech Stops have disappeared, they run out of bikes for interns, don't even get me started on how crowded the gyms have become, it's definitely worse than before. Perhaps I'm bitter because I got no annual bonus as an intern :)
In the end, it was inevitable. It was part of my reason to turn down their full-time offer and accept another company's. Last summer when I was an intern at Google, free cookies at 3pm were discontinued. By the time I got back in June 2009, we didn't even have a Tech Stop in my building anymore. No dance party, etc. Still, to me at least, this is not yet the time when Google became just another company. The stuff you learn there, the technology at your fingertips, and the capable co-workers are still amazing.
But it's headed that way. In the next 5-10 years, I predict the following will happen to Google. Most of it is quite obvious:
a. a major PR disaster, such as significant cloud data loss, or poor availability numbers for a day or week, something like that
b. stock will not have the same phenomenal growth
c. loss of search market share (of which a big deal will be made, but really, soon it will have nowhere to go, but down)
For me the deciding factors in choosing another offer were:
a. bigger company size => little chance to "change the world" like Eric Schmidt still likes to say
b. much better stock packages from my other options (Facebook's was essentially 4 times Google's at the latest valuation, and I do understand that's because of the higher risk, but for a college grad, that should be a no-brainer).
c. bonus perk I believe Google never had: 21 business days of vacation.
I fail to see how this makes sense as a Facebook acquisition. There are plenty of location-based social networks out there with many times the users and, I'm absolutely sure, available on more devices than this is.
It looks like more of a Facebook application than an integral part of Facebook.
Actually, this reminds me that the time seems ripe for the next big steps in browser-based E-mail, the next product that can take GMail's features like lots of storage and mostly search as a starting point. My conjecture is that lots of people are tired of GMail sucking and would give other web clients a shot. And it might take a while before good service returns to GMail (if ever) given the rumors about the hairy state of the code base.
Anyone know of anything that I should take a look at?