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Do you want a fork? Do you want to drive more people to Pale Moon? Do you want to become even less relevant relative to Chrome? Do you want to make the web even less user-centric?

A change like this is how you do that. Good job, Mozilla.

You know what also makes you sick? A lack of professional accomplishment, missing respect from your peers, and a general sense of purposelessness. It's easy to look at the costs of ambition and ignore its benefits.

Nicotine is best administrated through gum or a transdermal patch. I haven't heard of many people using it in pill form. Nicotine alone is similar to smoking a cigarette, but not identical: cigarettes also contain MAOI inhibitors which have synergistic effects with nicotine.

Modafinil and nicotine. Cocaine too, I imagine, although that's more a sales guy thing.

Why is it surprising that nootropics exist? Half the good people in tech are on them. And there's nothing fucking wrong with that. "My body, my choice", as the slogan goes.

I am well qualified to comment.

The specific root cause is Google's practice of promoting based on product launches; it literally doesn't matter whether that product goes on to be successful. This practice creates a strong and perverse incentive to continually launch new products while discouraging iterative development of existing products.

He's not missing much. It's just a big squabbling company.

> Being ethical is a core value of the company

> Google is trying hard to make it's hiring and promotion process objective and unbiased

Google tries very hard to appear to be ethical, unbiased, responsible, and generally virtuous. Sometimes this attitude results in good work. Other times, and I think more often, it amounts to empty posturing and counterproductive gestures. In the social sphere, this "be seen as good" attitude manifests itself as annoying virtue signaling, speech policing, and other behavior that you also see on American college campuses. This behavior is annoying, but very common in tech and easy to ignore.

The "be seen as good" attitude also manifests in technical culture, however. There's this weird attitude inside Google that what is painful must therefore be right, as if difficulty were its own reward. While it's true that the right thing is often painful, the converse does not hold, so Google makes some bad decisions.

Google's attitude toward developer friction is, "This process is slowing you down? Too bad. That's how responsible engineers work." This hairshirt-loving attitude leads to large teams, moving slow, and general risk aversion, and I think it leads to bad engineering-cultural choices.

Google: "This language feature causes problems? Let's ban it. We'll add headcount to make up for the productivity drop."

Facebook: "This language feature causes problems? Let's add tooling to warn developers about the dangerous usages and make sure we can quickly find bugs."

I've worked at a lot of tech companies. I don't think the people at Google are actually any more or less ethical than the people at other top-tier tech companies.

> moving fast is not valued as much

It's important not to underestimate how much moving fast makes you happy and how unhappy you become when moving to a slow environment having worked in one that moves fast.

Facebook's elevation of moving fast to a first-class goal goes a long way to slowing the kind of decay that Google has suffered.

> 100% pair programming

I don't think there's a faster way to send me running away screaming. I'd actually take "100% Visual Basic" over "100% Pair Programming" if I had to choose one at gunpoint.

> My suspicion is that Apple / Tim Cook knows something BIG that we don't that they are going to get PERFECT while they still have the cash fire hose of the iPhone to drive the engine.

Possible --- but it seems to me much more likely that Apple is just another big company suffering from the classic combination of innovator's dilemma and big company internal politics. What special immunity would Apple have to the problems that bring down every big tech company in its old age?

Tech companies are like people. They get old. If they don't die suddenly, they eventually succumb to general systems frailty and self-aggrandizing cancers. Sure, Apple might be one of those rare 80 year old marathon runners, but why would you expect it to be?

> Also, the areas in which Microsoft is revitalizing itself are green field projects like the cloud and some other interesting hardware/software integration

The example I have in mind is in a big legacy product. I can't get more specific without outing myself, but it's very far from greenfield.

> Specialized labor does help.

Specialization of labor can also hurt. I've found myself frustrated with security people in the past because they spend so much time thinking about security threats that they start to veto massively useful functionality on very flimsy security grounds. Broad exposure helps too.

> AB testing on wireframes helps and gets most of the edge cases. After you roll out to production things get hairy.

Why? There's no rule that says that everyone needs to see the same UI in production.

> Otto was based from Google expats, one from Google maps and one from the Google self driving car company. Your point is?

It's telling that Google autonomous drivers experts had to leave the company in order to get their work into a real live product.