Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own, etc etc. I have 0 to do with the Photos team.
Google Photos is an amazing product, it has an amazing offering and works extremely well. It's also extremely popular and integral to the Android ecosystem. I'd absolutely bet of it not being shutdown in the next 5 years, yes.
I guess that's interesting. Does the promotion process seem different? Ie different in the sense that you are finding yourself incentivized differently from before?
I never really cared much about promo and I haven't yet gone for promo with this new system so I can't really say. I think as far as incentives go in general nothing really has changed much, but what has changed is the amount of time we (ICs) waste on doing perf instead of doing actual work. From a manager's point of view it might be different, but for us it's more "forward" facing, we focus on what we'd like to achieve over the year and as we move forward we adjust our expectations and do regular check-ins to see if we're still on track or we need to adjust things. It feels more dynamic, but it's only been a few months so who knows.
Yup, both the mechanics and incentive structure have changed. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the intentions were to align personal incentives with business goals. Seems promising thus far.
I'm curious why you think that's something to be embarrassed about. I feel like it's a cultural thing but for example here in Japan it's very common to see this style everywhere (on TV, on billboards, on the train, on random websites, etc) and several of my coworkers also have these kinds of backgrounds or posters at work (in an open office).
It was frankly weird and bit disturbing to see some of the neckbeards in engineering school obsessing about cute depiction of young girls. To this day, it definitely colours how I see random use of anime girls on CS related topics.
I have no issue with it in its original Japanese setting and I wasn’t aware of its use by the LGBT community but it seems far less depressing in this case.
There are a surprising number of pedophiles (who will immediately 'correct' people to use the term "ephebophile" instead) amongst the techbeard community. I agree it becomes uncomfortably apparent after spending a bit of time with these types.
I don't know, this is mostly instinctual, but my guess is that this is subconsciously associated with the kind of cultural image of an anime enthusiast or furry as socially inept, meagre or generally nerdish.
> that the implication is supposed to be "Will you explain it to me".
This is not correct. It's hard to explain if you've never seen them in context but rather than "will you explain it to me" they are actually saying "won't you read this?" or "will you learn this language for me?" kinda note. They used to be commonly posted as OP image in programming threads on /g/ with lines like "have you read sicp today /g/?" or similar. There's also another very common variation of this meme for gamedev communities on 4chan with the girl from the anime New Game (see this[0] clip, I couldn't find the meme itself) with a similar vibe.
I have seen it, but I think that "won't you read this?" or "will you learn this language for me?" is just a front for "explain this to me", especially when considering the body language.
> is just a front for "explain this to me", especially when considering the body language.
? Why? There's nothing that indicates this, the history behind these images shows the clear opposite. This to me sounds more like your (unconscious?) biases are showing more than it actually being a thing. Trust me, it's not really how this meme works. If you actually look at most images in that repo the girls are either reading the book, explaining the book, or clearly pushing it (often aggressively) towards the viewer to make them read it.
EDIT: Are you familiar with Serial Experiments Lain? I think that was one of the first ones to pop up with these.
I browsed /g/ as a teen, watched lain and everything, but have since decided to consciously distance myself from this culture, to a certain degree because there is a sort of implicit "sexism" (in some broader sense) that I don't feel comfortable with anymore. The longer I stay away, the more obvious things like the way they draw faces and bodies, the often infantilizing postures combined with a kind of sexualization is. Keep in mind that drawn images can easily exaggerate human features that are not healthy or even anatomically possible, but that still serve symbolically as sexual indicators. This has become worse and worse over time, because fan service is good advertisement for publishing houses. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slice_of_life_anime and compare how the style has changed since the late 90's up until today. I think it is a lot more homogeneous and the appearance is more formulaic. Part of this might be that computer animation is more common place, but the other one is that a sense of beauty has been reduced to a mathematical problem of relating various proportions. It is also because I was part of this culture, that I know there is an explicit and intentional sexual aspect to all of this.
Reflecting upon my own impressions and how these changed, I am more conscious of these points and find it hard to ignore them. Assuming that I am not totally mistaken, which of course might be the case, knowing that others don't see these things pains me. More so when someone like the author of the link publically stands by it.
But you are right though that not every image is like this.
> That repo and the programming sock screenshot are both from 2017.
(I'm kinda repeating myself in this thread a bit, sorry but...) I can guarantee you that the anime girls holding programming books has been a thing for at least a decade, so the 2017 creation of that repository doesn't really mean much. Not sure about the programming sock meme but I think it's a bit more recent. However I do think it generates from certain "battlestation threads" on /g/ where people used to post photos of themselves sitting at their PC with those knee-high socks on and the meme kinda spread from there. Way before that screenshot itself.
Thank you. I suspected a common ancestor, but I didn't know what it was.
Makes perfect sense that a meme combining anime and programming would come from 4chan's technology board.
I suppose what made the meme interesting enough to spread is the subversion of the traditional hacker aesthetic. Having a beard voluminous enough to carry The C Programming Language inside everywhere you went was a sign of great experience and wisdom. As a bonus, it also horrified "the suits", who were hackers' natural outgroup.
In the 21st century you just can't annoy the suits the same way because even large corporations don't demand people wear literal suits anymore. Baffling the HN crowd is what passes for iconoclasm these days.
Nah the screenshot started it. Someone posted a similar one to /g and the responses said that it was an esoteric secret that womens socks and underwear made you a better programmer.
I believe a predecessor to that meme would date back at least to the early ‘90s, as demonstrated by the plot point in Wayne’s World 2 in which Olivia d’Abo’s character was approvingly identified for holding a book on Unix network programming.
