The Cambridge, MA location still has an aisle of keyboards and mice outside of their packaging. It's very nice to be able to hold and feel those peripherals as part of the shopping experience.
From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.
This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.
> It was argued that this approach allows Google to charge higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to publishers such as news websites.
It could depend on how they 'limit the number of bidders'. If they sell seats to be able to bid, then the bids are lower to account for that, and publishers get a share of the bid, not the fee bidders pay. I'm guessing though...
You could limit to one mark and a bunch of planted bidders in an attempt to control competition. If you win with your plants, you get to pay yourself anyway.
I think they meant that Google managed to limit the number of bidders for ad placement - they shut out other advertising groups -, so they could then charge what they want to those who need to advertise their business or perish, and take what they want from websites that publish ads as well (take a larger cut from the 'ad inventory' understood either as ad space or ads to be published). In this sense the linked article states:
"The US argues that Google used its financial power to acquire potential rivals and corner the ad tech market, leaving advertisers and publishers with no choice but to use its technology."
I think it does because a researcher can pick up context about the quality of their sources through the course of web research. The BigCo chatbot AIs are marketed to represent that BigCo, and people generally trust Google, in this case. It's good when they cite sources, but a major point of the chatbot is to abstract that legwork for most people.
"Lack of obstacles" really resonates. If we're talking about software dev, it's fun to get into a flow state and solve problems. Whether you actually get to do that at a BigCo seems like a roll of the dice. For every team that seems happy & effective, there are two encumbered by lack of agency, bureaucracy, pointless meetings, etc. Most people who got into software dev will work hard when there is actually something to do that is fun and engaging.
Most people don't decide about their own medical "needs." They trust doctors, who are by and large expert and professional, yet frequently discredited by insurance companies.
Insurance companies have too much power in this dynamic, and there should be limits to what they can deny once doctors deem it needed.
A lot of BigCo people's (myself included) perception of Java is tainted by the challenges of old, inherited code bases. Java has been ubiquitous for a long time, and it's not surprising to accumulate code bases that have been underserved maintenance-wise over the years. Updating dependencies on a Java 8 codebase isn't much fun, especially because semvar wasn't widely followed back in those days.
Early-in-career folks are more vulnerable. Even before major family/life costs start to play a role, it can be difficult to save enough for a safety net after moving to an apartment (even w/ roommates) from college & managing student debt, etc. I remember it took me a couple of years of stability to not feel at risk.
I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.
