Google is simply bored while making so much money so comfortably, with an absolutely dominant market position in search. So every few months they need to do these copycat things simply to entertain themselves ;-).
Just like how google's predecessors were not keen on search relevance so that users didn't find what they were searching for quickly - leading to them spending more time on the website and increasing ad revenue. We know where that logic led those companies to ;-)
Pretty standard in my opinion. Depending on your negotiability, you're going to get diluted 10-40% in every round. Do that a few times, and you can see where one ends up :)
We have been using Amplitude at 12 Labs (getapplause.com) after having tried several analytics platforms, and it's an amazing platform. Large free tier, really intuitive interface, and the tracking is really accurate (we did rigorous testing to verify that).
Yelp is an example of a system where it'd have been easy to be cynical about their system scaling up. It's nowhere near being a perfect system, but I use it frequently and I'm able to repeatedly find great restaurants there. It does work reasonably well at scale for me.
And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?
It's somewhat hard to argue with a generalization like this. It's like saying: you give loans to 100 people meeting some very specific criteria, and the return rate is great. When you scale it to a million, the return rate isn't the same any more.
Of course the return rate won't be the same with 1 million people. But if you are grameen bank (http://www.grameen-info.org/), you institute mechanisms so keep the return rates high. That doesn't mean that there are no defaulters at grameen bank. It just means they were able to work creatively on a problem and actually meet their metrics (maybe sligtly relaxed) at very high scales.
It's non-trivial, but not impossible.
I think a measure of low quality is: do users/participants actually stop using it because of bad quality? It's a point of debate, but for me HN's quality is as good (probably better) that it was several years ago. Just my opinion.
Yes, some of that company information is written with investors in mind, but AL allows you to share that with job candidates. Since that doesn't really contain super-sentitive info, it's almost a no-brainer to share with candidates (at least for us).
That's a really bad hiring strategy. What the company doesn't realize is that they are still paying 80%. If the company flipped their position and added an extra 10% to the 100%, it's conceivable that the motivation could actually make the employee 30% more productive and engaged with making the company successful.
Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through this - though you are probably better off not working there.
Maybe the salaries are actually that high. It's really difficult to hire engineers in the valley. And there are tons and tons of funded startups looking for them.
Unless you're a startup with celebrity status, you might just have to pay up.
You could say that about discussion forums too. But reddit and HN would disagree. Quality has to be managed and maintained. It's plausible to me that by designing the right mechanisms you could scale AL and maintain quality.
If you are saying that density of jobs posted varies by region I totally agree - that sounds reasonable. I don't want to defend other companies postings but that's a somewhat weak generalization to make, esp for Silicon Valley.