If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company. The way many (otherwise intelligent) people talk about it, you'd think it was a religion.

What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently.

In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.

As a Russian-American this comes off as complete BS. I've seen this written before and it's always in the form of "It's not us that smile too little, it's you Americans that are fake and smile too much!".

For one, Americans don't just smile to be polite. For the most part it's genuinely conveying positive emotions.

Now I know this is going to be unpopular, but I think the real reason Russians don't smile is cultural. It's because they are genuinely more cynical miserable people. This is completely a generalization and there are tons of exceptions on an individual level, but on average life (especially in the cities) is more cut throat, it's cold, the authorities are corrupt, people are asshole to each other in public, and if anything goes wrong you can be darn well be sure that no one will help you[1]. There is no sense of community, or impulse for people to help each other out and being nice to strangers. So naturally you're worried you'll get robbed or whatever - so you keep to yourself, don't make eye-contact, and don't smile.

If you go to the country side, people are a lot more likely to smile at you.

A bit of an aside - I've found it's also a very Slavic thing. Prague had very similar miserable faces, which Budapest was full of smiles (though economically the countries were very similar)

[1] I remember a story my friend told me of how he was on the subway and a bunch of skinheads beat up an African college student. After they left, no one did anything to help the kid, and everyone just pretended like nothing happened. A good ol' "it's non of my business" attitude.

Wow. He is about my age, and he lived in some of the same cities at the same time I was living in them. After reading this article, I immediately shared it on my Facebook wall before coming here to comment.

Some of the comments posted before this one express puzzlement about his "homelessness" when, after all, he had immediate relatives who still had a house to live in. Many cases of people living on the street are cases of people who have untreated behavior disorders that make them very hard to live with, even for their immediate relatives who have living space. The case of the author here is a case of a man who was brought up (as I am sure, having come from the same generation) to feel that it is his responsibility to provide for his children, and not their responsibility to provide for him. He used to live in Minnesota, where there is lethal cold outdoors during winter, but he was homeless in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where it can feel cold at night but where the weather is liveable outdoors year-round. The author thought it was more dignified and honorable to live in a car or something else like that than to crash in his children's housing.

On the whole, I'm very impressed by this man's maturity of outlook and gracious recognition of other people's point of view. He acknowledges, as several comments here have pointed out, that he made inexpedient career decisions. For a while, as he also acknowledges, he was "married to his job," and didn't give his wife enough encouragement and support as she brought up their children. He isn't passing blame around, but accepting responsibility. He may be a failure in economic terms in recent years, but his attitude now is admirable and shows a capacity to grow and keep on learning in middle age.

Do any of us know what industry and what form of employment will be a sure thing twenty or thirty years from now? No. But we can be sure that life is full of surprises, which sometimes include setbacks or even complete failures. Being ready to bounce back and try again is a good capacity to develop during youth. It's a crucial capacity to continue to develop into middle age. Now I'm curious about the book[1] from which this article was excerpted. This is the kind of thing I'd like to read for myself, as advice from one dad to another, and the kind of thing I'd like my children to read to prepare for their own independent adult lives.

[1] Tell Me Something, She Said by David Raether

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Something-She-Said/dp/14936318...

I love contributing to Mozilla. I contributed to a bunch of projects in the past years, including Chromium (a very friendly bunch BTW), but Mozilla makes me feel like I'm a real part of this, not just some guy sending a patch.

- Literally everything they do is in the open, volunteers can participate a lot if they want to, even start new projects. (~50% of their employees remote, I guess that helps a lot here.)

- They're mentoring people new to a project really well - I love this even though I prefer to just dive into the code myself.

- They call you a "Mozillian", send you foundation/company/product updates, invite you to Mozilla Summit (I was there this year, and it was amazing) etc.

- Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving the web forward and keeping it open. Makes me feel like part of a good cause, as opposed to unpaid labour.

All in all, they really got this figured out. I can recommend them to anyone who wants to contribute to something big/important.