As you might imagine, it’s quite a switch to go from criticizing Google from the outside to being on the inside. Jeff Jarvis, who was gracious enough not to make fun of me in public, nonetheless admitted to me privately that the news had made him chuckle.
As I finish my first week, I can sum the experience in a word: overwhelming. The tools for accessing internal information are better than I expected, but both the volume of baseline knowledge – technical and cultural – and the relentlessness of the update stream are daunting.
Indeed, the internal ecosystem is so rich that it’s easy to forget there is a world outside it – ironic given Google’s enormous role in the world outside it! Then again, this is just my first week – it will take me some time to pop up the stack from the build system to the surface.
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