Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read
I certainly remember lunchtime discussions at DEC and they were very different from today. We talked about philosophy, religion and politics quite a bit. In contrast, the culture at Google appears sterile from the outside, as raising such topics could get you fired.
At some point the personal qualities tech companies valued in engineers changed from insight and experience to raw performance under pressure. I trace this change back to Microsoft in the 1980s and 90s, where the hyper-aggressive, crush all competitors, business culture took root. As we know, this resulted in a federal court decision to break up the company.
