For me, the worst thing about working for Google is how much I know about the future. Reading these discussions is difficult because I have enough information to say a lot more than I'm allowed to. Google does not keep anything from their employees, but they do tell you to be careful about discussing it with anyone outside of Google.
I think this has a chilling effect on employees' participation in outside fora, leading to isolation between the internal community and the "real" Internet community. We have a lot of internal projects that could easily be Free Software, for example, but the person that wrote them got enough intellectual gratification from the internal community, and so never bothered. This is why you see people join Google and then disappear from the Internet. Google's internal community is like the Internet, but without all the bad stuff.
> For me, the worst thing about working for Google is
> how much I know about the future.
I'm assuming you're talking about the future as it relates to Google (future Google projects, future directions for current projects, what Google's end-game is for the self-driving cars, etc). No Google Time Machines in the works or Google Future Viewer for Android? ;-)
I think this has a chilling effect on employees' participation in outside fora, leading to isolation between the internal community and the "real" Internet community. We have a lot of internal projects that could easily be Free Software, for example, but the person that wrote them got enough intellectual gratification from the internal community, and so never bothered. This is why you see people join Google and then disappear from the Internet. Google's internal community is like the Internet, but without all the bad stuff.