Having made the opposite transition, I can say that there are pluses and minuses on both sides.
I certainly enjoyed being around reporters, and the programming team was one of the most fun I've ever been on. The computer science wasn't terribly deep (we joked that we mostly take, store, sort, display strings), but it was fun to be able to point people at interesting things you built[1], complex or not. And I do miss working with mostly industry-standard tech.
We got re-org'ed out of the newsroom a year before I left, though. Unless you're a huge newspaper with a commitment to the flavor of reporting that requires programming, a dedicated programming team doesn't make sense: better to consolidate at some central, non-newsroom location where you can build common applications for multiple newspapers and radio/tv stations.
On the other hand, I now work at YouTube, which is an exceptionally exciting, fun, dynamic (both culturally and pythonically) place to be. The scale makes things very interesting, and we affect people the world over. Oh, and San Francisco.
I should probably write a more carefully written blog post...
Just to add to that, there's been a huge uptick and interest in developers in the newsroom. The focus on data driven journalism has just kept increasing over the past couple years (full disclosure, I work for a non-profit that does tech training for investigative journalists).
I agree that the industry hasn't shaken totally free of the fucked up financial straights they got themselves into, but as it stands, there are way more developer jobs working on actual journalism projects (not building or maintaining CMSes) than there are developers to fill them (just see http://www.newsnerdjobs.com/ for some examples).
But ultimately you're absolutely right, there are tradeoffs, and working for an insolvent company is one of the ones you have to watch out for, although that's true out in startup land as well. Depends what you're looking for i suppose!
I'd be curious to hear more about what you worked on over at AJC (some of my coworkers were investigative reporters there a few years ago).
This brings up an important point I should have made earlier: I left the AJC three and a half years ago now, and Cox Media Group digital (if you're in Atlanta and want to work on Python/Django, you should definitely check them out) just under two and half years ago, so I am no longer current.
Over here in the Netherlands, years ago, there was a (humorous) commercial by a toilet freshener called Toilet Duck: "We, of Toilet Duck fame, recommend Toilet Duck". It's a phrase that's still occasionally used when someone notices a clearly biased self-promotion, and applies to this story: a newspaper reports that working at a newspaper is more fulfilling than working at Google. Call me unimpressed.
Maybe you're confused as to what Abe Epton actually does at the Chicago Tribune.
Although I don't know him, I am familiar with the News Apps team at the Chicago Tribune. Call it Data Journalism, news room development or whatever, but in almost all cases, people who work on news apps teams are developers, not (just) journalists.
So, if you're willing to accept TechCrunch op-eds from startup founders about the topics of their startups (and Hacker News certainly seems to), I am bewildered as to why you would have a problem with a developer comparing his current and former employment situations, and explaining why he prefers his current employer.
This headline is a little misleading, in that it suggests Abe went from being an engineer at Google to being an engineer at the Tribune. My memory is that Abe was in a technical specialist role at Google -- deeply involved in technical things, writing code sometimes -- but not in the formal engineering organization.
None of that harms his points, which I think are quite sound, and the actual article does not imply Abe was a full-time engineer at Google, but the HN title does seem to connote it.
Well, as the Abe in question, I can explain a bit :) I was a tech specialist on the News team. I worked with a team that managed the publications included in Google News, and specifically I worked on the technical side of the publisher inclusion process. It was nowhere near the kind of crazy-impressive engineering being done by the folks technically in the engineering organization, but I was writing code and maintaining infrastructure.
Obviously the paper isn't going to let him write a hatchet job on how terrible the paper is. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. If it takes months to get code pushed out at google and hours or minutes at the paper it would seem that google is slowly losing one of their big competitive advantages: innovation brought on by rapid iteration and public feedback.
Why is innovation brought on by rapid iteration and public feedback a competitive advantage of Google's? Not only can anyone do it, but if anything I'd guess Google does less because there's more pressure to succeed at launch.
Because for a long time they did precisely that: get stuff into beta really quickly and see how it does. As organizations get bigger there tends to be pressure to stop tinkering with stuff and start Doing Things Right (tm).
I think Google used to have a corporate culture which encouraged this and from what this writer says (so it's just an anecdote, not data) they might be losing that culture. Doesn't mean Google will fail but having that kind of culture is an ongoing job and it's non-trivial. Seems like they might be letting bureaucracy creep into the organization.
That's really not what I'm saying, actually. I think Google continues to be a fabulously innovative place. I loved my time there, and fully expect it to continue being revolutionary and transformative.
But the constraints of keeping a billion people's needs in the back of your mind are real, and they impose limitations on what you consider worthwhile. It just wouldn't make sense for Google to study Chicago Public School utilization data, for instance - it's waaaaay too small a focus - but I find it deeply fun and meaningful, and not having to make something bulletproof for 1/6 the planet to potentially use just means it gets out the door quicker.
"not having to make something bulletproof for 1/6 the planet to potentially use just means it gets out the door quicker" is exactly what I'm referring to. As Google's market share grows, so does the bureaucracy. It's one of the inevitable problems of scale and it takes a very strong conviction on the part of the company's management to actively avoid it. I don't think Google's management is actively resisting the forces to bulletproof things and as a result progress slows down.
But your point about working on fun projects that are too small to matter to the world at large is very well taken.
This is a great exchange program...Newspapers are strapped for resources and mired in bureaucracy that makes it hard to produce digital-age news products...but give some techies more domain-knowledge about civic data and they may be able to overcome the constraints of the average newsroom developer.
I say this as a former newsroom developer...One of the major impediments is the lack of digital literacy by the non-developer journalists. That is, before you can build a cool app based on their reporting and notes, you are going to spend a lot of time writing software that converts their reporting/notes into usable, parsable data...a problem that could be avoided if more reporters knew basic concepts of delimitation and data types...one workaround I've suggested is to take notes in a spreadsheet, instead of creating a folder of variably-named text files, i.e. "INTERVIEW WITH J.SMITH 9/5/12-Tuesday.doc"
Well, not everyone at Google is going to get to work on the glasses or the self-driving car. Someone has to work on GMail or Maps - and not the new features but the boring parts like bug fixes. Just like there are pilots on a Navy aircraft carrier, there's also a guy who is spending his 4 years as a janitor.
There's a lot of overlap between the open data/gov2.0 world and the journalism world. On a whim, I went to the main data journalism/"Computer Assisted Reporting"/newsroom developers conference last year (I had family in town so it was really cheap) and it was a great time.
They're also one of the friendliest communities I've ever met. I've been to many tech and academic conferences, but nothing's ever been as open and inviting as a journalism conference.
I certainly enjoyed being around reporters, and the programming team was one of the most fun I've ever been on. The computer science wasn't terribly deep (we joked that we mostly take, store, sort, display strings), but it was fun to be able to point people at interesting things you built[1], complex or not. And I do miss working with mostly industry-standard tech.
We got re-org'ed out of the newsroom a year before I left, though. Unless you're a huge newspaper with a commitment to the flavor of reporting that requires programming, a dedicated programming team doesn't make sense: better to consolidate at some central, non-newsroom location where you can build common applications for multiple newspapers and radio/tv stations.
On the other hand, I now work at YouTube, which is an exceptionally exciting, fun, dynamic (both culturally and pythonically) place to be. The scale makes things very interesting, and we affect people the world over. Oh, and San Francisco.
I should probably write a more carefully written blog post...
[1] http://projects.ajc.com/names/list/